Debates, soccer, and repetitious executions

I didn’t watch the Weds. presidential debates, but I did listen to them, running as background while Linda was watching. But I feel like I don’t need to know anything about these cretins beyond their ability to roar at full bellow to cover the fact they had nothing to say and no concept of what they were talking about.

Could be that I missed an occasional snippet of sanity, but I doubt it. I mean… these things are running for president of our country? How have we slumped this low, to become a backwash of rationality?

And why the hell did they have a live audience, where each bunch of boobs could cheer on their own particular court-jester-in-training? I guess to make sure that no one would take the whole business seriously.

But for a far more balanced, modulated and well-presented view than mine of that evening, read this piece – by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time, who is now one of the country’s finest columnists and writers:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/kareem-abdul-jabbar-on-the-2024-republican-debate?ref=home?ref=home

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Headline of the week: 

“Singapore to execute a woman for first time in almost 20 years”

Yup, last time she was executed she was only 16. Third time will be the charm.

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Why did the U.S. women’s soccer team not win the world title? Could it be because they’re human, or that no team anywhere, anytime has a cinch on three straight world championships?

But what pisses me most is how the media hyped this magnificent team to a level well beyond reality – then wanted to dissect what “went wrong.”

They did the same to Simone Biles in gymnastics, shouting that there was no way she could lose at the Olympics. What a godawful burden to place on any athlete or team. Smug motherfuckers who think they have the right and duty to tell somebody two stories above their level of competence how to believe, how to achieve. 

We also have our repulsive ex-president cheering their loss because Megan Rapinoe dared to highlight our failures as a country. Well, here’s what she had to say a few days ago on her retirement, once again proving herself a superb human being (and a damned good prose stylist):

 “I’ll miss being able to represent our country. I think, a lot of times, that gets lost, when people talk about me in particular: ‘Oh, you guys don’t sing the anthem, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don’t love America.’ But we do love America. It’s just more in a James Baldwin kind of way, not in a bald-eagle-on-your-shoulder kind of way.”

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Wife Linda came up with the best idea I’ve heard yet for the use of a chatbot. The bot would answer robocalls (whether the caller was human or AI) and engage in friendly, pointless talk for minutes on end, thus totally wasting their time and obliterating the sponsoring company’s profits. If adapted widely enough, it would put the bastards right out of business. Nobel Prize for Linda!

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Another odd corner of etymology:

“toast” – how did it come to mean both verbal enticement to liquid celebration… and a charred slice of bread?

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Bitcoin: 

I normally want to know how most anything works – the real mechanisms behind what’s going on in the world. But with bitcoin, I just don’t give a royal goddamn. If this isn’t a wholesale asinine scam, what is?

Give me the Shroud of Turin any day.

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