February Blahs in Interesting times
Too much heavy stuff going on right now, so I will take on some lighter topics such as The Olympics and Raccoon Reproduction.
The Winter Olympics have wound up. I have finished going through my recordings of some things I thought were worth a second look. All in all, this show is a good antidote for the late winter blahs and blues.
In between all this, I checked in on other events. We had the freestyle jackassing going on in Ottawa and other Canadian locations. We had the team relay warmongering over Ukraine.
However, I am going to keep this posting light. I will get into these heavy topics in the next week. Below, I have even definitively solved the Chicken or Egg” conundrum, which I came at in relation to the unrelated debate about whether inflation is about ‘supply ‘ or ‘demand’.
My three highlights of the Winter O all involve females. I think I have stated often enough that women are much better athletes. This is exactly because they do not have strength and endurance; they have to develop skill and courage. This is what makes them much more interesting to watch.
There seems to have been some problems with the food at the athlete’s villages. There were many complaints about it. A few athletes came down with mild food poisoning.
This was clear during the women’s cross country ski final on the last day. One top skier dropped out because of this. However, Jesse Diggins kept going with the pain in her guts and ended up with the silver.
This is my highlight number one. She managed to stay near the front of the pack throughout the race. The commentators thought something was a bit off with her and were amazed that she kept going so well.
For most of the back half of the race she was behind the Norwegian skier who was way in front of everything, but ahead of the third placer, who was also well ahead of the next one back. Whenever Diggins pulled into the loop, she would see Johaug going out, and as she came back out she would see the third place coming in.
It was severely cold, with a high wind whipping snow into their faces and sometimes restricting visibility. But the camera was set up at the finish line and Johaug came out of the distance, came nearer, and finally breezed over the line like she had just been out for a spin. As soon as she moved aside, there was Diggins, battling away on her cramping legs.
She crossed the line, flung her arms wide and emitted a triumphant squawk, and then collapsed flat on her face. As they resuscitated her, a fight for third place developed in the background. Niskanen shot from way back to beat whatzername who had been third for half the race.
Then Niskanen collapsed on the track as they half carried Diggins off, wrapped in an American flag.
Earlier, All Canadian girl Meryata O’Dine got into some trouble during the final race, mixed snowboard cross. She was third in a field of four. Number two wiped out and landed right on top of her. The TV commentator shrieked; certain that she must be injured and out of the race.
O’Dine quickly got up, dragged herself awkwardly on hands and feet still buckled into the snowboard, got to the crest of the rise, and got herself sliding down again. She finished in third, the one who snowboarded over her skull wandering over the line sometime later. Another bronze medal for Canada!
So to the women’s hockey team, who won back the gold medal they believe they have a divine right to. This was not surprising; the US team has not been playing up to its ability since the pandemic. This is clearly something to do with the coaching and management; there are some awesome USA hockey ladies.
Much has been written about the rivalry between these two teams. I suspect there is a pinch of Keyfabe in this recipe, but it makes great entertainment wonderful games. The USA has predominated for the past decade but it seems now like the problem which had been plaguing the Canadian team is now reversed.
This problem was well illustrated by the 2018 Olympic gold medal game, where the Canadian coach refused to let much of her team play, keeping others on the ice until they were dead tired and ineffective, thus causing them to lose where they would likely have won.
This time, the American women have caught this syndrome, while the Canadian management have figured out how to rotate their players. Many voices are asking why the American coach bothered to bring many of his players over if he did not like them or have confidence in them. His explanations of his handling did not make much sense.
Much of athletics depends greatly on the coaching and management, and this seems also to be the biggest problem. Often sports management seems to be about making money and keeping control over people, neither of which necessarily depend on actually doing well in competitions. It may well be that much of this ‘benching’ of players has to do with who is ‘talking back’.
This leads me into the very complicated topic of world level figure skating. I am not going to stay in it very long. The number one smelly subject in this olympics has been called Kamila Valieva.
No fifteen year old deserves to have her name stunk up like this. Assuming there actually was any real doping going on, she obviously did not dope herself, and almost certainly did not know she was being doped. She did not need at her age to get wrapped up in adult greed and ego, much less in a hybrid war between superpowers. Thus I support the idea that people under eighteen should not be in sports at this level.
Mother Russia does not need to keep getting its name run through the shit like this, either. It is likely that less doping goes on in Russia than in most major sports nations because they have been attacked so much for it. They have built one of the better national anti doping programs.
The Americans are likely the biggest athletic dopers around. Such practices are pretty much standard in American professional leagues. Since they are able to control the international anti doping system, they can cover themselves and simultaneously use it as a weapon against countries they do not like.
There are reasons to suspect that the doping charges against Valieva are at least partly bogus. Here are the two biggest ones; the drugs found in her system do not give any real advantage in figure skating. As well, it is very strange that the tests were sat on for some time and then announced once competition had started.
Yes, the Olympics are corrupt. Almost everything in the world is. That is the consequence of being willing to allow sociopaths to rule the world. What makes the Olympics beautiful is the athletes themselves. The best of them are the best of people.
So I spent the last two and a half weeks watching the olympics and only occasionally giving attention to all the nonsense unfolding in the world. I did find time to solve the greatest philosophic challenge of the ages; which came first, the Chicken or the Egg.
This feat I accomplished in the comment box of the economist Michael Robert’s blog. Roberts is one of the best commentators on economic problems around today. Find him here;
I have no idea of who is the shmook who recommented on my comments.
Here is the exchange;
Mister Roberts, I must inform you that your analysis of this mighty problem which is so concerning to all humanity, is totally wrong. I must set you and your readership straight on this subject.
No, the chicken did not come first. You are correct that there had to be a first chicken. There was some sort of mutation which occurred in a non chicken which it passed on to its offspring to create the first chicken.
The non chicken would have been an egg laying animal, like the chicken. So reproduction is mediated by an egg, which contains the organism until it hatches, hence the conundrum of which came first.
Nothing altered the genes of the embryo in the egg between it being laid and the chicken being hatched. So the egg was a chicken egg from the start, even though it came from a non chicken. Thus, the first chicken egg happened before the first chicken.
So there. Now, as for this minor problem of whether inflation is demand or supply driven, you get that right. Inflation is not caused by covid, but by the owner class deciding they aren’t getting enough money and picking up their marbles.
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Recomment;
“That’s like the chicken and egg argument. There is an answer to that conundrum. After all, the chicken came first. Chickens evolved from previous species; their eggs simply reproduce more chickens.” -> The FIRST chicken hatched from an … egg. Laid by an animal that WAS NOT a chicken. Crocodiles and dinosaurs have been laying eggs hundreds of million of years before chickens.
My reply;
I have to assume you have not read my brilliant solution to the chicken and egg conundrum. A chicken can only hatch from a chicken egg. If a chicken comes from it, it is a chicken egg, even if it came from a non chicken. It would be very interesting if a chicken laid a dinosaur egg.
Second recomment
“So the egg was a chicken egg from the start…”
Thank God for that or how else could we count our chickens before they hatch?
By the way, which came first – the placenta or the racoon?
My reply
What a fascinating topic! I I have a lot of raccoon friends, so I decided to run this by Big Momma raccoon. She lives in the bushes behind the power station, raccoon HQ for this neighbourhood.
She assures me that she has never laid an egg in her life. She is a placental mammal who gives birth to live young. Thus the question of the placenta or raccoon coming first is irrelevant.
I am in Toronto, by the way; where we hatch too many racoons to count.
Okay, next week I get into less momentous subjects like…whatever is happening next week. Sign up to receive e-mail newsletters of it.