Day 400 – Olympic Wrapup and Ukrainian Crap and the Tightening Net

Sunday, February 20, 2022

Olympics are almost over. Bobsledders were still bobbing yesterday as were the curlers. This morning I watched some of the closing ice skating performance. The girl who won the gold in figure skating looks so young. Nathan Chen did a series of quads and finished with a back flip. “I didn’t know he could do that!” remarked the commentator, probably, Tara Lipinski. I remember a black woman who was a skater 30 some years ago. She did a back flip during a practice and got reprimanded. Some thought it endangered other skaters a I think was allowed in performances. She also did quads in practices.

NBC rolled final credits after thanking the staff that put it all together, 2,000 to 3,000 people and three thousand hours of video. Yikes. The final credits rolled on the right side of the screen while the left showed highlights. I couldn’t take my eyes off all the memorable moments.

Aside from stunning performances there were also tales of redemption and dealing with disappointment. 

Mikaela Shiffirin’s interviews were especially memorable. How she had to think about each event she missed out on. How she dealt with it were examples for people to take home. I saw an article from the President of Barnard College that was excellent on this topic. Top athletes do what they do on muscle memory, almost unconsciously. Replaying your mistakes and errors over and over again can lead to going down deeper and deeper. Rather, it is better to put them in context of a longer run. Hopefully, Shiffirin will do that, and she appears to already have done it. 

I think it was on the third time she missed a gate she was asked what went wrong. Nothing, she seemed to say. She said she was skiing really well and the practice runs had been really good. She didn’t know what happened at that gate. She was doing what she intended. I notice other skiers had a problem at that gate and one of the commentators mentioned that perhaps there was a slight hole at that spot, which was unseen.

I was amazed at the level of performance these athletes are at. One snowboarder withdrew from a competition because she was told having the word PRADO on the bottom of her board was not allowed. This after she had already used it in another competition. She covered it up with magic marker, but it so slowed her board that she didn’t feel she could safely compete.

In the men’s halfpipe finals the wind came across the pipe so hard that it caused swirling and if a contestant got caught in a gust they could literally be blown off course, despite the large canvas wind screen that was erected down one side of the 650 foot pipe. Those winds resulted in some terrible mishaps on some runs. 

I hope that some of the Russian skaters are able to get out from under the oppressive coaches and state machinery that seems only interested in their performance and not their development. 

Then there were things I chose to at first misunderstand and then revel in the thought.

Then there were things I chose to at first misunderstand and then revel in the thought.

There was a hash tag that read something about kites, then I realized it was a conflation “ski” and “test” or maybe “team” which I misread. It wasn’t kites but skitest. Get it? do you see kites in there?

In the men’s final hockey match between Russia and Finland, it was Walmart against Khrushchev. Well, that’s what I heard. Turns out there’s a guy on Finland named “Walmark,” close enough. Never did figure out the Russian guy’s real name.

Moving on to Ukraine, there are photos of a military pontoon bridge across a river in Belarus pointed directly at Ukraine’s capital city. I don’t think Vlad wants a few provinces. He wants the whole thing.

And dear old Donnie, what can I say? He is close to being broke in the real estate biz, but he has now parlayed his political stuff into announcing a social media platform that suckers, I mean intelligent investors, can buy into. This is a perfect transition for him. Many think politicians are selling heated air. Others think there is a l of software out there being touted that doesn’t exist. It’s known as vapor ware. Add in a social media component to a political scam artist and it’s a whole lot of nothing. Talk about sand castles in the air!

Of course he has a few problems dogging him. He keeps losing in court. We still have a few institutions that depend on evidence and fact. Don’t know how long that will hold up, but so far DJT has lost every court grievance. He’s been compelled to testify in the New York tax fraud case. Don’t know how that works. What if he doesn’t show? etc. etc. etc.

Rudy is supposedly cooperating with the Jan 6th committee. Donnie Brasso, one of Trump’s minions who if I’m not mistaken was caught funneling illegal campaign contributions from foreign countries to Republican campaigns. Brasso is now cooperating.

Everyone keeps asking, “when is he going to get arrested?” Soon, soon, we are told.

Also, “What is main Justice doing in this regard?” Arresting Jan 6th rioters. Are they crawling up the food chain or not? We have no hint they are. 

Now the Chinese billionaire on whose yacht Steve Bannon got arrested is now claiming he’s broke and filed for bankruptcy protection. There is a complicated bunch of entities where his assets have been funneled off to that are being untangled, however the point remains he and others are now wriggling around trying to avoid their fates. 

And DJT and Ivanka and Jr are subpoenaed to show up in New York to explain how an asset can be worth two very different values at the same time. It’s not clear to me what happens if they don’t show.

And there has been Fox, which was all over a claim that Hillary had sent people to infiltrate the Trump campaign. Where did they get this tip? Why from something that independent counsel left over from the Trump admin had filed. It’s sounded bad. Then the same counsel who filed these papers in court said various news sources got it completely wrong. The words and language Fox used don’t appear in the document at all. Huh? Honest mistake? Well, let me ask you this, if an organization that made such claims was a reputable news organization wouldn’t they correct the record? Yes, of course. But Fox is silent. That’s about all one needs to know about them. But let me continue. Remember when Jon Stewart made fun of them for using the wrong crowd picture of a rally? The rally they were pushing had a much smaller size than the picture they showed. Sean Hannity said it was “an honest mistake.” I’m waiting for Trevor Noah to grill them.

And to finish up with Fox I attended a luncheon wherein a person said that no one could pass through the Van Allen Belt to get to outer space. He went on to ask why no one had been to the moon in years. (Maybe, the two statements were the other way around.) So I did an exhaustive search. Okay, I put in “Van Allen Belt” into google and lo and behold there’s an article about the very thing.

Discovery of the Van Allen Belt goes back to the days of the earliest satellites: Sputnik, Echo, Sputnik II, and Telstar. the Van Allen Belts are two large donut shaped areas of radiation surrounding the Earth held in place by the Earth’s radiation. 

In 2004 a person sent a letter to Dr. Van Allen which said based on a 204 Fox documentary that people could not survive passing through these belts. Nasa scientists knew the radiation levels of these belts to be too weak to hurt an astronaut. Nevertheless, they provided screening and they charted a course that avoided most of both belts. Van Allen wrote on a letter sent to him asking him to verify the veracity of Fox’s claims from their show. He wrote, “claim that radiation exposure during the Apollo missions would have been fatal to the astronauts is only one example of such nonsense.”

So this nuttiness has been with us for quite awhile. We unfortunately are getting stupider as a nation.

And before I got to post this Putin has invaded Ukraine. He says they are peace keepers. Right. I think we should aid in the peacekeeping efforts and deploy some of our peacekeepers. I think we have a missile called that. We could start there. Then a few aviation exercises showing planes practicing knocking out tanks.  Purely an exercise, nothing to worry about.