The Sports Page

Big sporting news this week!

Well, hearing that the Russians have turned sports cheating into their national passtime is not exactly surprising — and anyway, what's a little doping in sporting circles?  Putin, of course, says the report from the World Anti-Doping Agency (motto: play true, not capitalized) is just another US sponsored cabal designed to demean and belittle Mother Russia (capitalized), and that innately superior Russian athletes don't need performance enhancing drugs.  After all, Putin himself managed to score all those goals in that hockey game without doping!  Okay, there was no goalie, and his opponents were, shall we say, motivated to see him succeed, but what the hell?  Nobody can deny (for many good reasons) he's a real man, and the embodiment of everything wonderful about Russia.

The other sporting news came from the University of Missouri*, where demonstrations by black students and a hunger striker may have, sort of, led to the resignation of the school's president.  Okay, okay, the threatened strike by UM's football team was the clincher.  No, it wasn't just the million dollar cancellation fee UM would have had to pay if it missed its game with Brigham Young, it was something even more important — it was football!  Now if somebody just could sign up the NFL for Black Lives Matter...

*Don't let anybody tell you Missouri is the Midwest.  It's the South.  It's the good ol' barbecue eating down-home racist South.

High School Football

There was an article in yesterday's Times about the arrest of seven high school football players from Sayreville, NJ, on charges of sexual assault on at least one fourteen-year-old freshman player out in the good old locker room.  The Times pussyfooted around a bit, but it seems that three of them are charged with anally raping the kid or kids.

Sports teams are kind of like prison — sex crimes are probably more about power than about sex.  The most amazing thing about this case is that a victim was willing to speak up, rather than just waiting a few years and relaying the abuse to some younger kid.  People blame the coach, but my guess is that the coach stayed out of the locker room for fear somebody might think he was a perv.

I'm generally against contact sports, and I'm against football more than all the others.  The combination of concussions and the sense of entitlement among players seems like more than a civilized society should be willing to accept — but then, who says we're civilized?  Maybe we should just bring back gladiatorial combat.  That way, half the assholes would wind up dead at the end of the "game."

Janurary the last

Stoner Bowl

It seems I am not allowed to use the actual name of the event that will take place on Sunday.  Pretty much everything I publish online is clearly marked as "public domain," because my heirs can make their own money if they are so inclined and talented.  The NFL is not so secure.

Frankly, I think football is dreadful, given that it is rehearsal for war, not to mention all that traumatic brain injury.  I'll be at my local school district's budget hearings this year, urging the assholes to abandon football (and football's enormous insurance costs) for the upcoming year.

Most likely outcome: bleeding forehead from being beaten against brick wall.  Forehead: mine.

TPP

Yes, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is NAFTA on steroids, and will do extraordinary damage to working Americans while making a shitload of money for Big Money.  Obama is looking for fast-track authority, of course, since he's in the pocket of Wall Street.  Most likely, he'll get it.

If Elizabeth Warren votes to give him that authority, so help me, I never will vote for anybody, ever again.

Turkey

Erdogan, of course, is totally corrupt.  So is everybody else, almost certainly including the opposition.  Should we pull our money out of Turkey, South Africa, Brazil and whatnot, and toss it into Germany and Austria?

That's what's happening.  Put it in the USofA.  It, too, is totally corrupt, but better protected.  Nobody is dropping the smart bombs on us now, but maybe there are some targets that deserve it.  The rest of us... well, the rest of us...

When they blow us up, maybe we'll deserve it.