The Olympics we don't want to see.

Last night, after I finally got home from work after being stuck for an hour behind a wreck on 290 (thanks Houston drivers) I was watching the Olympics when diving came on.

Full disclosure: I'm not much of a fan of diving. It's a judged athletic competition that makes no sense to me how they score it, and it's pretty much a snooze-fest unless a dive goes horribly wrong.  And even then I'm not happy because I don't want to see any athlete hurt.

But I was struck by something one of the announcers said during the lead-up to a dive by eventual gold medalist Quan Hongchan  If you've never seen Quan dive, she is amazing. She's only 17 (she's been competing at the top level since age 13) and she rarely misses. As a matter of fact, the Chinese are so good at diving their only true competition any more are themselves.

But, this comment, by former American Diver Laura Wilkinson I believe (and if I'm wrong I'm sorry, I tuned in with the event already in progress) got me to thinking. Here's what she said:

"Quan was drafted into the Chinese diving academy at a young age. One of the benefits of that is that the State agreed to provide her mother, who was very ill, medical care for life"

The two announcers then went on to gush about how great that was, how nice it must be for her. In fact, her Wikipedia page, clearly written by the Chinese government by the way, talks about how much she "loves diving".

Uh-huh.

Read into this and it becomes a little bit clearer why China is so far ahead of everyone else in diving. 

They're conducting military-style drafts of athletes in certain events and training them up, for life, to do one thing. I'm guessing, at a very young age, means that they are "drafting" these kids into the academies at somewhere between 4-6 years old?

One imagines that life in the academy means LIFE in the academy. You don't see your family, you live on the compound and you train and train and train.  Remember in the Acolyte (Disney's recently released, and fairly awful, Star Wars series) where the Jedi were slammed as monsters for doing that to younglings?

But we glorify it during the Olympics. The Chinese government basically forced a child to dedicate her entire early life to a sport, or face the prospect of her very ill Mom not receiving the medical care that she needs.

In many pools in America, kids under the age of 12 aren't even allowed on the 10m platform for safety concerns. How many young Chinese kids are getting injured (or worse) by being forced up onto those platforms at an early age?  Sadly, we won't know this because China would never let that information out.

Look, it could be none. The Chinese diving academy could be the safest environment possible. I'm not suggesting that it's not. What I am suggesting is that we don't know. Nor do we know much about the Chinese Olympic sports program at all.

We know the Chinese swimmers dope and we know that they are also very good at Table Tennis and Badminton. They seem to be pretty good at shooting BB guns. (what else would you call air pistol and air rifle?) Outside of that however we know very little about how they prep and train their athletes.

I know what you're going to say here. "Those who live in glass houses should not cast stones" and you are right. America has not been a shining example of sport in the past. We have our horrific ladies gymnastics scandal, several Track & Field athletes who have doped, and athletes who have copped, usually after the Olympics, to horrific tales of physical and mental abuse.

The difference is none of this was State sponsored. And in almost every case the bad actors have been caught, and either shamed, stripped of medals or (in some cases) criminally prosecuted. Also, we learned lessons. In ladies gymnastics we certainly learned that importing coaches using training techniques and methods that originated behind the Iron Curtain is not the way to go.

Look, the Chinese government and people seem to be OK with this system. As Americans we probably need to deal with this and let them run their own shop. That doesn't mean that we should not condemn the doping, and it's very fair to ask questions when any Chinese athlete does something that seems too good to be true at this point, but we cannot lecture them on how they run their shop.

What we can do is to ensure that we don't try to run our shop that way, even if it means that in sports such as diving we're just always going to be a few steps behind. The Chinese divers are amazing. And, by all accounts, China is breaking no rules in making them that way. But America needs to look at what we know is happening to make them that way, and decide whether or not we want to play that game.

My thought is a hard no.

I'm already bored (and done) with this election season.

If you spend any time watching the Olympics then you undoubtedly know what America Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has been told to believe in by her handlers. (read: Barak Obama's people)

Yes, we get it. An America where the working class are suddenly given things that two decades of Democratic rule have taken away from them. a fair shake for the "working man" and....abortion.

It's Hope! It's Love! It's Fairness!  It's leading to endless dreck like this and this.

Please make it stop. At this point, between the hokey media coverage of Harris/Walz and Trump's continuous droning on and on and on and on about well....himself, the campaign has already grown tiresome.

If you've read this blog for any period of time now, you know that I gave up on politics a long time ago. I don't vote, I just don't care. After 23 years of working with governments at all levels at my place of employment I've learned that it doesn't really matter who is in charge, which party gets to claim victory. The graft and political favors just go to different people, but they still go regardless of who is in power.

Whether it's a Democrat or Republican government they're still going to make sure your taxpayer dollars go to their political patrons. The people who supported them and got them into office are going to get PAID, it's just that the names on the checks are different.

And the politicians themselves are going to engorge themselves on the public largesse. Yes, even bastions of the little guy like Bernie Sanders and "The Squad" are getting rich off the public teat. The only good place to be in an authoritarian government is in the Politburo after all.  You (and I) are not there, they are.

While there might be some window dressing around the edges that looks a little different the window of politics for both parties is the same. For Democrats, they want to make sure that the people who have been with them since the days of Al Gore making a movie that contained multiple factual errors get theirs. For the GOP it's their friends in the petrochemical industry.

That energy security probably means a mix of oil, solar, geothermal and nuclear is not the point. You government doesn't give a shit if you freeze in the dark, as long as their political patrons get paid. And the greatest crime against humanity is that our politicians have wasted Trillions of dollars trying to prevent climate change instead of investing Trillions on how to DEAL with it. Leadership?  You wish.

So now we're facing a long, bleak election season with the top of the ticket race being a match-up between Barack Obama's Avatar and.....The Orange One.

The honest truth here is that, no matter who wins, we all lose.

News Round-up (08/06/2024)

 The "Yay!!! I have A/C back" edition.....

I'm still not entirely convinced that AI is going to revolutionize the way we do business, but our politicians are stupid enough that it might impact how we live (or don't live) our lives.

At this point does it really even matter?

*snicker* He's such an angry little man at this point. Here then is a more reasoned take. Probably better to take the latter over the unhinged ranting of the former eh?

Hello Houston. Yes, it's hot Damn hot.  Remember to drink a ton of fluids and stay hydrated.

At what point do we just feel really sorry for Houston's incoming Police Chief? On another note, is there any City Department that did not almost totally implode during the Turner Administration?

Speaking of useless and the Houston Chronicle At what point do we all admit that this Editorial Board has long outlived it's usefulness and should just be shuttered with the headcount and resources redeployed to the newsroom?

RIP to the Bayou Bucket  Sad.  But, this is going to be the norm as College Football continues it's inevitable march to NFL Lite.

The problem when you get partisan political sports writers is ugly, partisan columns such as this This is just a poorly written screed whose main target are the great unwashed. Some nuance is much needed on this topic. Sadly, modern media lacks either the intelligence or the desire to address it in an adult manner.

Probably a case of "Too little, too late" for Centerpoint from a PR perspective (and make no mistake about it, this is a PR move) but at least it's something in terms of grid resiliency. 

Ever seen a self-fulfilling prophecy? It seems no one in America really wants a civil war, except for Hollywood and the media.

I mean, you distribute thousands of contraceptives, then you kick people out for dressing inappropriately?

And finally.....

This is either a big thing, or a tempest in a teapot. Time will tell us which. (And I'll admit to being unsure at this point)