4X100 metre relay has always been my favourite track event. US team was overwhelmingly favoured (as usual) to win last night’s men’s final at the World Championship as they currently have the fastest four individual runners in the world. However one beauty of the event is that it is a team event and an inferior bunch of individuals can win if they work better as a team. That is what happened last night.
Otherwise it was a pretty dismal competition for Canada as the US dominated the sprints.
I don’t follow track & field too closely but I vaguely recall watching the men’s 4x100 relay in the 2020 Olympics in 2021 that I was so far behind in watching it was probably almost 2022 by the time I saw it.
The Canadians got the silver and the US didn’t qualify for the finals. I think they have a long track record of falling apart… dropping batons and just having terrible exchanges. They played a little segment on TV about all the problems that have plagued the US team over the years.
And as you say, it’s not that they’re not fast runners; it’s that they don’t work well as a team. Probably take their cues from Congress.
I agree there is some analogy to Congress. There are some giant egos among the US sprinters so they are more concerned with winning their individual races than cooperating to win in a collaborative manner.
The biggest difference between Congress and the US 4 x 100 men’s relay team is that the US relay team has a lot of talent to draw upon! The downside of this is the US team experiments with many combinations of runners versus Canada which concentrates on fewer athletes to run the relay so they are better coordinated on handoffs, etc.
Yeah, it’s definitely not a perfect analogy.
First faux pas on Pope’s reconciliation tour?
I always thought those headdresses are really pretty. I’d love to own one. But I guess we can’t own such things nowadays without looking insensitive.
Not sure how this qualifies as a faux pas. It was given to him by a chief of one of the First Nations. If Trudeau did it sure, but obviously this group thought it was acceptable. And he seemed to treat it with the appropriate respect it deserved.
It was a no-win situation for the Pope. It would have been an insult to refuse it from the giver but others were insulted that he received it. I think he did the right thing in the circumstances.
Seems reasonable. Wonder if the US Supreme Court would come to the same decision.
seems unprovable unless recorded
It’s highly probable if pregnancy or certain STD transmissions occurred.
nah, sex is a private matter, and unlike rape where there might be some physical evidence of abuse, there’s no way to determine who’s lying
given that this is consensual sex, and assuming it’s not more than two people it’ll always devolve into a s/he says s/he says scenario.
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that doesn’t prove anything.
scenario 1: both agree to not use condom, 1 side regrets it
scenario 2: both agree to use condom, 1 side uses condom to wipe against self after
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scenario 100000: condom fails 2% of the time
Like basically every crime ever, you are dealing with some level of ambiguity and the jurors will have to decide if the witnesses are credible. “Guilty beyond reasonable doubt” does not mean “guilty beyond the slightest shadow of any doubt” or no one would ever be convicted of anything.
This sort of case would be unlikely to ever come before US SCOTUS, since such criminal laws are the domain of the states.
The exception to this would be if the crime were somehow under federal jurisdiction, perhaps due to the crime being committed in a federal facility outside the jurisdiction of any state, like on a military base or between folks with diplomatic immunity abroad. Even then, I can’t imagine how such a case would rise to SCOTUS review; you’d likely have to have two such cases coming through two appellate courts which rule different from one another to get on the SCOTUS docket, since this is not a case requiring constitutional interpretation.
I’m not certain how this Court would rule but given some of the statements suggesting that they might be OK allowing birth control to be criminalized…
It’s always tricky when it comes to sex, because there will almost never be any witness. Rape will sometimes leave some evidence of violence, but asking someone to wear a condom? Good luck proving that. Especially when the condom can just fail on its own 2% of the time, which is higher than a lot of alpha values.
Considering how many sex tapes there seem to be floating around in the wild (or so I’m told), it might not be as difficult as you expect.
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