Texas Needs More People Like This

Texas has an image problem. Not as bad as, say, Mississippi or Alabama, but bad. A lot of it probably has to do with their sheer size and visibility. Texas is massive, politically influential, wealthy, and oil-rich.

Thus, when they do something stupid, everyone knows about it. For someone not living in Texas, it's very hard to remember that that stupidity is a product of only a subsection of the population.

Obviously, we have Austin, which is famous for being "weird," as they like to call themselves. But I, and most of the people that I know, consider Austin as almost another state. That's not good. It is part of Texas.

Similarly, Texas has large numbers of intelligent, tolerant people. They may currently be out-shouted by the maniacs, but they are no less a part of the state. Texas needs more visible people like this to help drive that point home. It might help their tourist industry.

I Still Support Lance Armstrong

I assume that I am not the only person out there who still supports Lance Armstrong, but I'm going to say this anyhow. For one thing, I accept that the procedure by which the case against him was developed is one-sided. Cases that would never in a million years pass successfully through a court trial are held up as fact. The USADA is a sham organization.

That said, even if the USADA was as pure as the driven snow and Lance Armstrong was a creature of pure pitch straight from the pit of Sheol, my opinion wouldn't change. I may not like Armstrong as I now do, but I would still stand in support of his activity.

Likewise, I stand in support of every single major cyclist who was nailed for doping. I stand with any athlete who uses performance enhancing drugs. I see nothing wrong with it because there is nothing wrong with it. People get up in arms about it, but when forced to try to explain why they are up in arms, the explanations all  fail to pass even the most rudimentary analysis.

Not only do I support the principle of using drugs, but I also support Armstrong's wins as legitimate. The only way we can assume that they are not legitimate is if we likewise assume that no one else was using this special mojo that Armstrong was using. We now know that this is not true. All of the major players were using drugs, and in all likelihood, most of them are currently using drugs. If everyone was using drugs, and Armstrong still won, in my book that makes his wins legitimate.

But I feel that is beside the point. Armstrong (to say nothing of Ulrich, Basso, and others) did nothing wrong by taking the drugs. For me, a better case cannot be made than the documentary Bigger Stronger Faster: The Side Effects of Being American, the entirety of which is available on YouTube.

And if you don't choose to watch it, I'll leave you with a couple of questions. Why are hypobaric chambers and chemically engineered nutrient bars legal, but drugs not? Why were Oscar Pistorius' artificial limbs legal, but drugs not?

Why I Don't Care About The Olympics

It's not just the Olympics; it's all sports. I'm growing tired of every major sporting event and am even becoming contemptuous of many. The problem, in the main, is commercialism. The avarice, greed, and outright money-blinded stupidity of major sporting events is becoming impossible to ignore.

Haters of big sports have been attacking this element of them for some time. With a simple Google search, I was able to find multiple articles about the overt commercialization of NASCAR going back to the late 1980's. Every football season brings out another article decrying the loss of value in sports, with tickets costing hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars; the major regulatory agencies push copyright to the breaking point in a desperate attempt to control each and every possible manifestation of a game in the public; and to be associated with the game at all requires paying out in a huge way. It. Is. Disgusting.

The Olympic Committee is a grand example of the corruption brought about by financial motivations. The committee is supposed to be non-profit, but how does that jibe with this quote from the Wikipedia page of the IOC:

Until 1992, both Summer and Winter Olympics were held in the same year. After that year, however, the IOC shifted the Winter Olympics to the even years between Summer Games, to help space the planning of the two events two years apart from one another, and improve the financial balance of the IOC, which receives greater income on Olympic years.

Short answer: it doesn't.

Or take this sampling of headlines showing that the stupidity doesn't just end at the IOC, but extends to the dumb-as-rugs media companies and countries that are willing to spend buckets of money in this farce.

• UK Trying To Censor Parody Video About The 2012 Olympics
• No Free Speech In Advertising When It Comes To The Olympics
• London 2012 Olympics Win Gold Medal For Cluelessness By Banning Video And Photo Uploads To Social Media During Games
• Olympics Can't Handle An Official Parody Twitter Account, So Twitter Takes It Down
• Don't You Dare Show Olympic Spirit In The UK
• Olympic Level Ridiculousness: You Can't Link To The Olympics Website If You Say Something Mean About Them
• Olympics Crack Down On Anyone Mentioning Them Without Paying... As White House Tells Everyone To Set Up Olympics Parties
• It's An Olympics Tradition: How Difficult Can NBC Universal Make It To Enjoy The Olympics?

Add to this the suffering that the athletes must go through, dealing with absurd rules that no sane person would accept or put up with. Do this, penalty! Do that, disqualified!

The functional problem is the sheer amount of money at stake. Whenever there is a lot of money to be made, the number of cooks in the kitchen increases by an order of magnitude, and it ruins things. Sports, and the Olympics specifically, are no different.

The aspect of this mechanism that is driving me away is that, in the fight for all of the money, they are fucking everyone else, and seemingly doing it with glee. The viewers, the cities, the athletes, the fans, everyone is getting fucked. And when the IOC, London, the NFL, and any other organization does something that is a bald-faced money grab, they are literally saying to everyone "we are going to fuck you, and you are going to take it because... you are going to take it."

No. I'm not going to take it. Not anymore. When you are visibly and undeniably disdainful of your audience, and your willingness to bully, blast, and otherwise be belligerent knows no bounds, I have no interest in even recognizing that your events are taking place.

Oh, China.

China has been stripped of the Olympic team bronze for gymnastics for... 2000? WTF?

My first thought is, duh. It was pretty obvious that China used girls who were quite under-age for the 2008 games, which resulted in something of a controversy. So, I guess it's not surprising that they did the same thing in other years as well.

But on second thought, While it's shitty that China ignored the rules, especially considering that their handling of Olympic hopefuls is still very much in the vein of totalitarian governments, the girls did it, not the government. I say let them compete. They won, fair and square. They worked hard, and to take the medals away because their government is run by a group of self-centered sacks of shit doesn't seem right.

China stripped of 2000 gymnastics medal for underage athlete (Yahoo.com)

It's For The Best.

Chicago recently lost out in early contention for the 2016 Summer Olympics. I don't understand why the hell cities even compete for the damned games. The games cost a fuh-reekin' fortune to woo and then provide for. The taxpayers foot an enormous bill. The load on city services stretches it to the brink. And the final result is lots of big buildings no one will ever use again and usually get demolished, and a population pissed off because they're disappointed that their time in the sun wasn't all they hoped it would be.

"This was Chicago's shot at coming out as a world-class city so it's deflating," said Kevin O'Hara, 48, who runs a financial trading firm in Chicago.

"I wanted to be part of what I thought would be history. It just goes to show that Chicago is still the Second City, or perhaps the fourth city after today," said Kevin Gross, 37, an attorney who had joined a crowd packed into a downtown plaza, making reference to the city's nickname "The Second City." (Ben Klayman, Reuters)

Chicago IS a world-class city. It's famous, clean, with low crime, high education and services, and really big buildings. Whether you host the Olympics or not is not an entrance into some private club. Most cities that have hosted the Olympics are forgotten almost immediately after hosting the damned games. Just look back a few years.

Albertville? Where the fuck is Albertville? Who the hell has ever heard or cared about Albertville. Or what about Montreal, Canada. They hosted the 1976 Olympics, and the city is still in debt, to this day, over the games. They never earned the money back, and today, most people have forgotten the games were ever there. Most Montreal residents would certainly like to forget. And Lake Placid? Why the hell has Lake Placid hosted the games twice?

Chicago is lucky to have not gotten the blasted games. Instead, spend the money on city renovations, beautification, and innovative projects that draw visitors over long periods of time. Projects like The Bean add character and stature to the city. In a world overrun with massive cities, it's difficult for a city to achieve uniqueness. The bean succeeds. The Olympics fails. Fuck the Olympics.

Let Them Play Together.

I am utterly convinced that men and women should play sports together. Sporting associations must eliminate the boundaries between the sexes and allow anyone who can compete to play. Currently, a 350 pound, 6-foot-tall woman could not play in the NFL. Why? Because she's a woman. But a 5-foot-tall 180 pound man could. I'm not saying the man doesn't deserve it. But the metric is not performance, and that's what it should be.

Yes, in many sports the performance will skew male, but why exclude? In sports where there's no reason for a performance deficit, women under-perform men. Skiing, snowboarding, auto racing, bowling, darts, you name it, men perform better and earn more money. Raise the women to the same competitive level and just watch as the performance figures rise.

I mention this because of Caster Semenya. The only reason any of this matters is because of the separation of the sexes. Eliminate them. I mention this because if women knew that other women were highly competitive, they might watch sports. As opposed to how it is now, where male sports garner attention from males.

Women In Sports: Sex Objects, Mothers, Or Too "Manly" To Count (Jezebel.com)
Caster Semenya was told lies while she had gender test (Mirror.co.uk)

Oscar the Grouch.

Oscar Pistorius didn't qualify. He set a personal best but didn't make it.

I was going to post about him when his possible disqualification from the Olympics came because of the, erroneous, belief that his carbon fiber legs provided him an unfair advantage. Yep. Look at that advantage as he doesn't make it.

It also made me think about the limits being placed on people who can compete. Since competition in sports requires a level playing field, one would think, we have to define what "level" is.

Why do we disqualify people who use steroids? Why not vitamins, or those who train at high altitudes? How do we say that one person is cheating while another is not by simple attempts at augmentation of their own body?

I don't think we can. I don't just not care about steroids, I fully SUPPORT them. I think you're an idiot for taking them, but if you want to drink the juice in an attempt to push your limits higher, more power to you. Cheating, I think, requires a secret manipulation of the playing field. For example, paying off a judge, tripping your competitor, or secretly using equipment that others don't have.

Strangely enough, that third part IS generally legal. If you want to wear some wacky shoes for running, you can. Sharksuit, good to go! But pushing your body hard, that's right out.

Ohhh! And He's Hit by the Old Bean Ball!

It's Sunday. That means football. Well, at least for the US that means football. For the rest of the world... uhhhh, I don't know what that means. Probably means they worship Marx and Lennin. Damned communists.

Ok, politics aside, my friend loves, and I mean loves the New York Giants. I don't know why, since he's only ever been to New York to watch their games. Still, he owns their swag, he watches their games, he's one of those guys who even watches people watching the game. I can't even begin to describe how much I hate John Madden.

I know all about the psychology of sports, namely that males in competition experience massive fluctuations in their hormone levels. The winner feels a massive boost of testosterone while the loser experiences a massive drop. After watching him flip out over a touchdown pass, I realized how this was all possible. It's actual as simple as reinforced behavior.

Why do people watch games religiously? They're hoping for the high that comes from their team winning. The connection is so great, that people just watching the game experience similar fluctuations in hormones. When the home team wins, the fans get a big high. It's like a drug.

My friend is actually positively reinforced to watch the games! This may explain why he loves a team he'd never been anywhere near. His first experience with the positive high from a sports win may have been with some Giants fan. Lord knows who. I know none of his family like the team. He then actively watched another game and experienced the same high.

Only adding to the iron grip of sports fan-ism is the schedule of reinforcement. The fan gets small hits during the game, after great plays or big scores, then gets a huge hit if his team wins. As all you psychologists know, intermitant reinforcement is the absolute strongest kind, since the subject never knows when the next hit may come, they just keep on trying.

This is a great perspective from which to look at sports. The sports with the biggest hormone hits both during and after the game are the ones that are most popular. Both football and soccer are big on action and plays, and low on points. That means that for every point comes a huge hormone hit. Not a perfect theory, I admit. It fails to explain why hockey is so unpopular. I bet I can explain it away by the need for ice and lots of expensive equipment.

This is quite a revelation for me. Perhaps if I had opted to take that class on sports psychology I would have simply read this in a book, but then my sense of mental achievement would be deadened. Gimme' a break. I don't like sports. I need to get my highs from somewhere.