5/8: M-o-h-a-m-m-a-d M-o-u-s-e
7:45 p.m.
• So I wasn’t feeling too inspired to write anything, seeing how I just spent 90 minutes out in the yard uprooting some shit. Jesus Christ, large roots are the suq. Anyway, I went over to the other place and found the following story. Leave it up to good ol’ Jesse Jackson and his poverty pimp posse to give me today’s installment of OMG BASEBALL IS A WHITE MAN’S GAME (except for all those Hispanics)~!
Upset over the lack of African-Americans on the Braves roster, members of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow-PUSH Coalition asked for a meeting with team officials. They got one Monday.
Joe Beasley, Southern Regional Director for the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said he and Dexter Clinkscale, the director of sports for the organization, met Monday morning for nearly two hours with Braves general manager John Schuerholz, assistant general manager Frank Wren and three other Braves officials.
"The team slipped ... down to [no African-Americans]; it wasn?t something that just happened," Beasley said Monday afternoon. "I think it was a lack of diligence on the part of the Braves to recruit African-American players. There's not diminished enthusiasm for African-Americans playing baseball. It's simply the opportunity hasn't presented itself.”
Schuerholz acknowledged the meeting Monday but declined further comment, saying in a statement: "We had a meeting with Mr. Beasley and another member of his organization this morning and discussed a variety of topics."
Less than 10 percent of major league players are African-Americans. In a recent interview on the subject, Schuerholz said: "You go to where the talent leads you. Finding major league-caliber baseball players is far too difficult if you try to narrow your criteria down to demographics."
Countered Beasley, "As I expected, [schuerholz?s] idea is the bottom line: I'll put the best 40 men I can get wherever I can get them from on the field, and that's fair. But the fact of the matter is if they put resources into recruiting here in the United States, and more specifically here in Atlanta, there are talented players here."
The issue was brought to the attention of the Rainbow-PUSH Coalition during the 60th anniversary celebration of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier. The Braves and Houston Astros did not have any African-American players on their 25-man rosters at the time. The Braves' total grew with the promotion of left fielder Willie Harris, who is from Robinson?s hometown of Cairo.
"You slipped down to nothing, now you've got one, we expect it to start going up higher," Beasley said was the sentiment he voiced in the meeting. "We want to see incrementally it move back up, rather than moving down. There was an openness on [schuerholz's] part to talk and to be in dialogue and hopefully be in partnership in trying to make sure that it happens. He was very nice, a gentleman. I'm going to hold him to his word to work with us and move those numbers back up to a respectable level."
Hey, I got an idea. How about Rainbow PUSH open up its own scouting firm so they can show to those cracker general managers what they’re missing by not putting their resources to searching the ghetto for the next baseball great rather than, oh, I dunno, the Latin American market?
• Big Travel worse than Big Tobacco?
Mark Ellingham, founder of the Rough Guides and the man who encouraged a generation of travellers to pack a rucksack and explore the world, has compared the damage done by tourism to the impact of the tobacco industry.
Ellingham now says travelling is so environmentally destructive that there is no such thing as a genuinely ethical holiday. He wants the industry to educate travellers about the damage their holidays do to the environment. The development he regrets most is the public's appetite for what he calls 'binge-flying'.
'The tobacco industry fouled up the world while denying [it] as much as possible for as long as they could,' said Ellingham. 'If the travel industry rosily goes ahead as it is doing, ignoring the effect that carbon emissions from flying are having on climate change, we are putting ourselves in a very similar position to the tobacco industry.’
Wouldn’t “binge flying” be those Hollywood types hopping on private jets on a whim to zip from their 50,000 square-foot residence to their vacation home in Europe?
• I never liked Mickey Mouse, but his Muslim brother were around when I was a kid, I might have joined his club.
Hamas militants have enlisted a figure bearing a strong resemblance to Mickey Mouse to broadcast their message of Islamic domination and armed resistance to their most impressionable audience—children.
A giant black-and-white rodent—named "Farfour," or "butterfly," but unmistakably a rip-off of the Disney character—does his high-pitched preaching against the U.S. and Israel on a children's show each Friday on Al-Aqsa TV, a station run by Hamas. The militant group, sworn to Israel's destruction, shares power in the Palestinian government.
"You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists," Farfour squeaked on a recent episode of the show, which is called "Tomorrow's Pioneers."
"We will return the Islamic community to its former greatness, and liberate Jerusalem, God willing, liberate Iraq, God willing, and liberate all the countries of the Muslims invaded by the murderers."
Children call in to the show, many singing Hamas anthems about fighting Israel.
Awesome.
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