Selene Mariposa
@Selene_Mariposa • 15,444 subscribers
Reagan conservative | low taxes my religion | writing romance as my unholy ministry | Executive mom | Last conservative in blue PNW
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He did not file a lawsuit. He filed paperwork. Enes Kanter Freedom, third overall pick in the 2011 draft, eleven NBA seasons, 748 games, six foot ten and 250 pounds, has declared himself eligible for the WNBA draft in April of 2027. Here is the part that makes it clever rather than merely funny. He is not claiming to be a woman. He said that "if simply declaring who you are is all that's required," then he meets every requirement, and asked only that the rules be applied equally. He went out of his way to say he is not mocking any community or anyone's personal choices. That is not a punchline. That is a compliance filing. Because this week a Fever coach said she lacked sufficient biological information to weigh in on males in women's sport, and a Valkyries forward said she would welcome a trans athlete on her team or against her team any time. Somebody wrote all of that down. So the league now has three doors, and every one of them is the story. Door one. They reject him because he is male. That concedes the category is biological, which is the sentence they have spent years refusing to say out loud, and Sophie Cunningham is owed an apology in writing. Door two. They reject him on some other ground. Age, tryouts, prior league, whatever the lawyers can find. But he meets the published criteria, and every workaround they invent is a rule they could have written for the real question and chose not to. Door three. They admit there is no written standard at all. That is the one nobody is ready for, and I suspect it is the true one. Meanwhile the phones are apparently ringing. Rumor has it Diana Nowitzka has been feeling like a woman lately and is weighing her options. Dwayna Waid is said to be intrigued. Tonya Parkes is reportedly stretching. Carmela Anthone has told people she is at peace with herself and available in April. None of that is confirmed. Neither is anything else in this story, which is the point. And so, at long last, let the tanking begin. Somewhere a front office is running the numbers on a six foot ten prospect with 748 games of NBA tape. The 2027 lottery just became the most valuable object in professional basketball. Start losing now. Thank me in April. He is never going to play in that league. He knows it. Everyone knows it. He is going to make them write down why not. That is the whole fight, and it always was. Nobody in that league has to lose a game to lose this one. They just have to answer the letter. 🦋
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Let me get this straight, because it broke my American brain. In the UK there is a thing called the telly tax. You do not pay it because you watch the BBC. You pay it because you own a television at all. The physical box in your living room. So the government charges you for the privilege of owning a screen, then uses the money to fund the channel you were trying to avoid. It is a cover charge for a party you never wanted to attend. And now 2.6 million households have looked at that deal and said no thank you, the biggest walkout in a generation. Meanwhile, in the land of the free and the aggressively over-appliance, I have six televisions. Six. All of them Samsungs. One exists purely to play weather radar and college football in a room I enter twice a month. Nobody taxed me for a single one. No letter, no inspector at my door confirming I own a Samsung. So here is my modest proposal for everyone over there still paying. You still own the box. You still get the bill. So on the same night, all of you, haul the telly down to the river and on the count of three heave it in. Call it the London TV Party. You already have the blueprint. Some colonists did the exact same thing with a boatload of tea in a harbor once, and it worked out pretty well for the ones doing the throwing. The BBC taxes the box, so you drown the box. No box, no tax. No tax, no lecture. Just a very confused fish watching reruns at the bottom of the river. I am not saying start a revolution over a television fee. I am just saying it would not be the first time a tax in the water turned into a whole new country. 🥃🦋
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Teenage girls went to a basketball game in my backyard(Seattle) wearing t-shirts. According to journalist Brandi Kruse, who was there, they were cussed at, berated and deliberately tripped by adults. By fans. Reportedly with a team owner in the vicinity. For wearing a shirt. And here is the part that should stop everyone cold. The shirt said XX and XY. That is the female karyotype and the male karyotype. It is what is printed in every biology textbook in every classroom in this country. Rare chromosomal disorders exist and produce no third sex, because there is no third gamete. There never has been. They were tripped over a fact you learn in ninth grade. The Storm have said nothing. The WNBA has said nothing. A league that markets itself relentlessly on love, inclusion and belonging watched grown adults go after teenage girls in its own building, and could not locate a statement. Imagine the press release if those girls had worn anything else. They were there to support Sophie Cunningham, who said she believes girls should not have to compete against males, and that she offers truth alongside love, not hate. They held signs saying thank you for speaking up for girls. That is what earned them a foot in the aisle. I live here, and I am done pretending I do not recognize the pattern, because it is the same attitude that is killing this city. City leadership that treats the businesses employing our neighbors as the enemy. Open drug use on sidewalks where children walk to school. A homelessness crisis everyone can see and nobody in power will honestly name. Every one of those is a problem you fix by looking straight at reality, and this is a city that has made not looking into a civic religion. Compassion is the branding. Conformity is the product. Agree and you are family. Step half an inch outside the consensus and the warmth evaporates fast enough to give you whiplash. Seattle used to be the most beautiful place I had ever lived. It is being run into the ground by a fringe that mistakes volume for virtue, and the ordinary people who live here are paying for it. But there is no version of this where adults tripping teenage girls is the righteous side of anything. If your movement requires shoving fourteen year olds over a chromosome chart, you have lost the argument and you are simply angry about it. And a housekeeping note for the franchise. You are 6 and 23. Dead last. The worst record in professional women's basketball. Maybe spend less energy policing what teenagers wear to the arena and more on the part where you cannot win a game. Say something, Seattle. Those were somebody's kids. 🦋
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I watched Elon Musk’s interview with The Economist and heard him claim 250,000 girls were systematically raped by grooming gangs in the UK. It sounded too monstrous to be real, so I did what I always do. I went to check the receipts myself. I wish I hadn’t. It is worse than the number. A warning first. If this kind of thing enrages you, if you have children, if you do not have the stomach for it today, stop reading here. You do not have to carry it. Honesty first, because I do not post numbers I cannot defend. The 250,000 figure is not a documented count. It is an extrapolation scaled up from local cases. Here is the hard truth though: it might be accurate, and it might even be low. Nobody can say, because there has never been a full national audit or an investigation of every town. The number is unproven precisely because the country has refused to go looking for it. That refusal is its own answer. Here is what the government’s investigations did find. The 2014 Jay Report: in Rotherham alone, at least 1,400 children sexually exploited over sixteen years, and that was the conservative estimate. Baroness Casey’s 2025 national audit confirmed the same pattern across Rochdale, Oxford, Oldham, Telford. Nearly 19,000 children flagged as exploitation victims in England in a single year. The Met is re-examining 9,000 cases. No one knows the true total, because for decades the people paid to count deliberately did not. Both reports found the convicted offenders in these networks were Pakistani Muslim men. And officials avoided recording that fact out of fear of being called racist. Let that land. They stayed silent about who was doing it because they feared an accusation more than they feared the abuse. Girls as young as eleven were written off as troubled teenagers making lifestyle choices. The system did not fail to see it. It chose not to look. Then the punishment. Some got what Britain calls serious sentences. Shabir Ahmed, the Rochdale ringleader, 22 years for 30 counts of child rape. Others 35. In much of America a single count could mean life. There, 30 counts draws 22 years, and then they let you out early. Ahmed served 14 years and walked free this July, shielded from the deportation his victims were promised by a 1971 immigration loophole. Several offenders held dual British-Pakistani citizenship, which is exactly why removal was promised and exactly why the failure to deliver it is so damning. Qari Abdul Rauf served two and a half years of six and is still in Rochdale, seen shopping in the town where he abused children. Adil Khan, who impregnated a 13-year-old, called his case racist and a laughing matter in court and argued he should stay because his son needs a role model. And the coldest part. For years the trouble was not the abuse. It was talking about it. Britain’s speech laws have only tightened since, with people jailed over social media posts, one woman handed 31 months for a single tweet. A nation that struggled for a decade to jail child rapists moves overnight to jail citizens for the wrong words online. That is the whole sickness. Rape a child and you may serve half a soft sentence and stroll home. Post the wrong thing about it and the state finds its spine. So make the sentences serious and mean it. Deport who can be deported. Protect the people exposing this, not the institutions that buried it. And count them. Every town, every case, no matter what the number turns out to be. Failed by their abusers, the councils, the police, the courts, and a state more offended by a tweet than by their suffering. Every betrayal preventable. These are children. Say it out loud, whatever it costs, because the silence is what let it happen. Thank you, Elon, for the reminder that when something sounds too awful to be true, the only responsible thing is to go check the receipts yourself. The number was unproven. What sat underneath it was worse. 🦋
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The World Cup ends today. One game left. By tomorrow most of you visitors will be packing up, heading to the airport, going home. So before you go, let me say the thing I actually want to say. A few weeks ago I wrote a silly post about all the things you were discovering here. Free refills. Free water. Ice like civilized people. Chips and salsa before you even order. Air conditioning that is a fact and not a moral debate. Drive-throughs. Ranch by the gallon. The Germans standing in the HEB meat aisle in reverent silence, finally understanding why we do not have trains. Buc-ee’s, for which there are still no words. It blew up, because it was true, and because you were so delightfully stunned by all of it. Even the Wall Street Journal caught on. Their headline this week: how the US lost the World Cup and won over the world. We did not lift the trophy. But apparently we lifted something else. We even learned a few things about ourselves along the way. Like the fact that Elon Musk, the single richest man on the planet, shops at HEB. Just rolls in and queues up for fresh tortillas with everybody else. The man could buy the tortilla company, the state it is in, and the moon it sits under, and instead he is standing in line at the hot-tortilla counter like the rest of us, because that is where the good ones are. Only in America is the wealthiest human alive elbow to elbow with a mom of four at the salsa bar. That is the whole country in one aisle. And here is the part I want every one of you to hear on your way out the door. None of it was a show. We did not roll all this out because you were coming. The ice was always there. The refills were always free. The grocery stores were always the size of aircraft hangars at ten on a Tuesday. The stranger who adopted your whole section, the guy who gave you a ride, the waitress who remembered your order, the family that invited you to the cookout, that is not World Cup America. That is just America. That is Tuesday. We are exactly like this when nobody is visiting. Loud, generous, ridiculous, overfed, and genuinely thrilled you came. We will still be exactly like this tomorrow when the stands are empty and the flags come down. So thank you. To everyone who came, who sang in our streets, who cleaned our stadiums, who turned our cities orange and filled our bars and taught us your chants. You were wonderful guests, and you made a country that just turned 250 feel young and seen and loved. And to everyone who could not make it this time, the door does not close today. We meant all of it. Come whenever. The porch light stays on, the fridge stays full, and there is always room for one more at the table. You found out who we are these last few weeks. Good news. We are like this all the time. Safe travels home. Y’all come back now, you hear. 🦋
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Everyone is posting about Ceuta. Almost nobody knows where it is or why it exists, so let me fix that, because the history is the entire story. Ceuta is not in Spain. It is in Africa. It sits on the north coast of Morocco, an eighteen square kilometre wedge of Spanish soil surrounded by Moroccan territory and the sea. Population around 83,000. Together with Melilla to the east, it forms the only land border the European Union has with the African continent. Look at a map. The Strait of Gibraltar is fourteen kilometres wide at its narrowest. Eight and a half miles. The ancients called the two headlands guarding it the Pillars of Hercules, the Rock of Gibraltar to the north and Monte Hacho, which sits inside Ceuta, to the south. That gate has been the hinge of the Mediterranean world for three thousand years. Now the history, which people keep getting backwards. The Romans held it and called it Septem Fratres, the seven brothers, which is where the name Ceuta comes from. Vandals, then Byzantines. In 711 a Berber commander named Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed that strait and began the conquest of Spain. The rock he landed at still carries his name. Jabal Tariq. Gibraltar. Then it turned the other way. Portugal took Ceuta in 1415, an event historians treat as the opening move of the Age of Discovery. When Portugal regained its independence from the Spanish crown in 1640, Ceuta alone chose to stay Spanish. Portugal formally ceded it in the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. So Ceuta has been Spanish for 358 years, and European for 611. Morocco, as a modern independent state, has existed since 1956. That matters, because Morocco claims both enclaves as colonial relics. Spain calls them integral national territory and EU soil, which legally they are. And here is the pattern nobody mentions. In 2002 Morocco quietly occupied a tiny uninhabited rock called Perejil, a few hundred metres off the coast. Spain retook it with helicopters and special forces. In May 2021, after Spain admitted the leader of the Polisario Front for medical treatment, Moroccan border guards stood back and roughly 8,000 people walked and swam into Ceuta over two days. Spain's prime minister called it a serious crisis for Spain and for Europe. In 2022 Spain reversed itself and endorsed Morocco's autonomy plan for Western Sahara, and the border trouble stopped. Read that sequence again. The border opens when Madrid displeases Rabat. It closes when Madrid complies. There is a name for that. It is called instrumentalised migration, and the EU used the same language about Belarus pushing people at the Polish frontier. Whether it rises to an act of war is a lawyer's argument. That it is coercion using human beings as the instrument is not seriously disputed by anyone who follows the file. Now the current numbers, and I am going to be careful because everyone else is not. Ceuta's regional president says 60,000 entered, more than seventy percent of the city's population. Spain's Interior Ministry says close to 50,000 since Thursday, and that more than 48,300 have already been returned to Morocco. Al Jazeera reported 1,500 to 2,000 over ten days. Those figures cannot all be true. At least 18 people are dead, drowned or crushed at the breakwater. Some reports say more. Children are sleeping in parks. Spain has deployed the army. Italy is talking about extraordinary measures. The one number I am confident in is the dead one, and it will rise. So before the next hot take flies past you, remember what you are actually looking at. A European city on African soil, older in Spanish hands than the United States has existed, sitting on the narrowest gate between two continents, being used as leverage in a fight about Western Sahara. That is not a migration story. That is a border being used as a weapon, and people are drowning in it. 🦋
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Two women are carrying women's basketball on their backs right now, and neither one of them works in the league office. Caitlin Clark brought the audience. That is not a talking point, it is arithmetic. She moved ratings, sold out arenas, and dragged a league that had been ignored for twenty-five years into the center of American sports conversation. The new CBA that lifted the minimum salary above 300,000 dollars and quadrupled the cap does not happen without the money she generated. Every player in that league got a raise because one woman from Iowa would not miss. Sophie Cunningham gave the audience a reason to stay. She said girls should not have to compete against males. She said she was offering truth alongside love, not hate. One sentence, said plainly, in a sport where almost nobody in authority will say anything plainly. And she has been standing in the open taking incoming ever since, while the institution she plays for has not managed to say her name. Look at what happened to the people who showed up for her. Two sixteen year old girls wore XX-XY shirts to a Storm game and held a sign that said thank you Sophie for speaking up for girls. They were booed. A fan yelled security, take the trash out. Two women tried to trip one of them in the aisle. A team co-owner screamed obscenities at them until one of them cried. The league fined that owner and suspended her five home games, which means the league conceded every fact of it. Teenagers. In an arena. For a t-shirt. So think about the actual scoreboard here. Clark built the market. Cunningham defended the category the market exists to watch. Between them they have done more for women's sport in three seasons than a generation of committee statements. And the league's contribution has been a deleted gambling video, a suspended owner, and a head coach who said she was not educated enough from a scientific standpoint to answer whether males belong in the women's game. She coaches women for a living. The cape in this picture is a joke. The job is not. Somebody has to stand between little girls and the people who decided that protecting their category is a controversial opinion. Right now that somebody is a shooting guard from Missouri who was not asking for the assignment. Back your players. They are the only reason anyone is watching. Write that down. 🦋
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FIFA is floating a 64-team World Cup, and the whole football world is groaning. I am not. I just think they will do it badly, because they always do it badly. So here is the version that works. Sixteen groups of four. Two advance. That gives you a clean 32-team knockout bracket and kills the ugliest thing about the current format, those eight best third-place finishers they invented because 48 does not divide cleanly into anything. It was a fudge and everyone knew it. Sixty-four fixes it by accident. 127 matches. 64 nations. And the champion still plays only eight games. You doubled the field and did not add a step to the winner's road. Now the part that changes everything. One group, one city. Sixteen groups. Sixteen host cities. Your group plays every match in the same place. Fans book one hotel, one flight, one week off work, and settle in. Right now a supporter chases their team across a continent, three cities, three flights, three hotels, and half of them just give up and watch from home. Under this, a city does not host a match. A city adopts four countries for two weeks. And oh, the cities are going to have opinions. Whoever draws Japan should just relax. Those fans will stay after every match and clean the stadium, and if they get bored they may simply tidy up the whole city while they are at it. You will get your town back better than you left it. Whoever draws Scotland needs to order the booze in advance. All of it. Call your distributor now. The Tartan Army will be the best-behaved, most joyful, most catastrophically thirsty guests you have ever hosted, and they will make lifelong friends of everyone they meet, right up until the beer runs out and there is a diplomatic incident. Whoever draws the Netherlands needs to source orange buses. And orange everything. Those people will turn your downtown into a citrus flood, they will bring a marching band nobody asked for, and honestly it will be the best two weeks your city has ever had. Whoever draws Argentina, may God be with you. Whoever draws Norway, get the salmon in. Whoever draws Mexico, congratulations, your city just became a party and you were not consulted. That is a World Cup. Not a logistics exercise. A town square with the whole world in it. And here is the money. The moment the seeding is announced, the entire bracket exists. Every path, every matchup, every city, on one sheet of paper, months out. Bracket mania. Global bracket mania. Americans fill out 60 to 70 million brackets every March for a college basketball tournament. Office pools. Group chats. Grandmothers picking by mascot. It is the most engaging fortnight on our calendar and it exists entirely because you can see the whole map at once. Now do that with the entire planet. Which means killing the draw. Let us be honest about what that ceremony is. A man in a suit pulling balls from a bowl while the world pretends the biggest decision of the tournament was left to chance. It is a plot device, and it always bends the same direction. Toward the money, toward the hosts, toward the broadcast windows. The draw is not a ritual. It is a lever. So do it the American way. A committee seeds all 64, publishes the criteria, announces the bracket live, then defends it in public while the whole planet screams at the television. Transparency does not kill the drama. It creates it. And oh yeah. Kill the third place game. Nobody cares that you are the second best loser. Two heartbroken teams playing an exhibition in front of people who came for something else. No child has ever dreamed of lifting that trophy. Cut it. More nations. Cleaner bracket. One city per group. A bracket you can hold in your hand. Show me the committee. Show me the criteria. Then hand me a pen. I have picks to make. 🦋
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Well. My team is out. Belgium sent us home 4 to 1, and I have made my peace by eating a waffle out of pure spite. So now I watch the rest for the love of the game. And I have picked a horse. Well. Actually, I picked a longboat. I am riding with Norway. Five and a half million Vikings against the entire world, led by that six foot four Norse god Erling Håland, who already threw Brazil off a cliff on Sunday. Do not act like you are not watching too. Now, some perspective, because people forget how hard this thing is to win. In 96 years, only eight nations have ever lifted the World Cup. Brazil, 5. Germany, 4. Italy, 4. Argentina, 3. Uruguay, 2. France, 2. England, 1. Spain, 1. That is the entire list. And here is the joke nobody says out loud. Every single one is from Europe or South America. Every winner, every finalist, 96 years running, two continents. The Dutch, the Hungarians, the Swedes, the Czechs, all European bridesmaids. Nobody else has ever even reached the final. So let us be honest about what this actually is. The World Cup is a European and South American Cup, and the rest of the planet gets a lovely invitation to come lose in the group stage. And before anyone cries, we would do the exact same thing. Give us a World Championship of American Football and it plays out identically, just with the flag flipped. Sure, Belgium shows up. Curaçao shows up. Everybody gets a jersey and a nice hotel. And they all go home in a barrel. Even Canada, right next door, cannot hang, because they are off playing their mutant cousin version with three downs and a field the size of an airport. Bless them. It is almost football. That is what a home sport looks like. The World Cup is just soccer’s version of it. And two of the names on that trophy belong to countries that do not even exist anymore. West Germany won three titles before the wall came down. Czechoslovakia reached two finals before it split in half and vanished off the map. Whole nations came, competed, and disappeared, and the trophy outlived them. So here is where we are, and the bracket does not care about your feelings. Argentina still has to get past Egypt today. Switzerland draws Colombia today. Then France gets Morocco, Spain gets Belgium, and my Norway gets England. You have to pick one. Everybody does. And it says everything about you. Some of you will pick the favorite. The safe money. The chalk. And some of you will ride the long shot, the little country nobody believes in. So which are you. The one who confidently picked the Soviet Union to win gold in 1980, right up until a bunch of American college kids walked onto the ice and ruined your whole afternoon? Or the one who always, always bets on the miracle? I know my answer. Five million Vikings and a thunder god. Skål. Let’s ride.
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Today America roots for Norway, and I need you to understand exactly why. We love an underdog. It is not a preference. It is a genetic condition. Two hundred and fifty-three years ago, a handful of colonials with no navy, no army, and no chance decided to throw a tea party in Boston Harbor to spite the largest empire the world had ever seen. An empire the sun never set on. An empire that could have ended us in an afternoon. And when the greatest military on earth said you cannot possibly do that, our answer was, and remains, hold my beer. Then we picked a fight we had no business winning. Then we declared ourselves free before we had actually won anything. Then we went out and made it true. We turned 250 last week. Still here. Still loud. That is the whole American operating system. The impossible odds. The comeback. The redemption. We do not just like that story, we are that story, and we will root for it anywhere we find it. It is why a bunch of college kids beating a Soviet hockey machine in 1980 still makes grown men cry in bars. So today. Norway. Five and a half million people. A country with more sheep than starting lineups. Playing England, a founding nation of the sport, on the biggest stage there is. Now let me be fair. We love England. Truly. Best ally we have got, and I say that with a full heart. Though the Japanese are gaining fast, so do not get comfortable. We love the Scots. We love the Northern Irish. We love our drunk cousins in Ireland, and yes I am lumping you all in, because half of you moved here anyway and you hate the English for reasons we are all familiar with. Nobody loves Wales. Nobody knows Wales exists. Nobody can understand a word of it. But I digress. Because today is not about any of that. Today is about five million Vikings walking into a stadium against an empire, with everyone on earth telling them they cannot possibly do this. You know exactly what we say to that. Let’s row!!! NORWAY!!!!!!
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Watch this all the way through. This is a perfect example of what makes Americans different. Everyone notices the big things. The wins, the headlines, the moments the whole crowd claps for. Almost nobody sweats the small stuff. That two percent that looks like it does not matter. The detail you could skip. The corner you could cut. The standard you could let slide just this once. Here is what history keeps trying to teach us. Empires do not fall on the ninety-eight percent. They fall on the two percent nobody thought was worth the trouble. The little crack you ignore today is the one the whole thing collapses through later. Americans, at our best, are the people who refuse to skip the two percent. That is the whole secret. Mind the small things. They were never small. Yours Truly, The Rebel Scum 🦋
Selene Mariposa135,765 次观看 • 1 个月前
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