Are you not entertained?

Re-arranging my belongings at home provided me with an opportunity to re-read some of my newspaper commentaries from years past.  I am pretty darn impressed with myself, I tell ya.  For one, even in my earliest commentaries, it is clear that I quickly learnt how to write, after a disastrous start in graduate school.  More importantly, I am pleased with myself for the consistency with which I have argued many of my positions.

In one of those commentaries, I argued that the local government should not be in the entertainment business.  I wrote this in the context of Bakersfield's plan to spend gazillions on an arena.  My point was that we do not have governments in order to entertain us, and that sports and arenas should be left to the market.  Of course, given how much people love, love being entertained--no wonder Trump made it to the top with his reality entertainment--and given how much I am always on the losing side, well, ...

This is not a new position since graduate school.  I was even more opposed to governments investing in entertainment back when I was a commie sympathizer.  I was an undergraduate student when India hosted the Asian Games.  Television was a new thing in our lives at that time; yet, I decided that I would boycott it.  I did not watch even one minute of those games on TV.  I could not, and still cannot, understand why the government would waste all that money on entertainment when there were far more urgent human problems everywhere in India.  The only difference is that back then I did not articulate an argument that entertainment should come out of private spending.

Next month, it will be the mother of all sports entertainment--the Olympics.  As I have done with the past events, I will boycott this too.

Those with money, who want to be entertained, have somehow managed to convince those without any money--who also like to be entertained--that investing gazillions of public money on all things sports is an economic investment with huge returns.  One awesome bullshit that happens over and over again only because the unthinking people like to be entertained 24x7!

Any unbiased observer will tell you the same thing: You may as well dig huge holes, fill them with all the money you have, and pour concrete over them!

Economists are notorious for being unable to agree on anything. So it's striking that on the finances of the Olympics, they almost all agree.
"Investing in the Olympics is not worth the investment," says Andy Zimbalist of Smith College.
"You build all these facilities that are perfect for the Olympics, that are not really as desirable once the circus leaves town," says Allen Sanderson of the University of Chicago.
"You end up with a very indebted city or host nation long after the confetti is cleaned up; someone has to pay the bills for it," says Bob von Rekowsky of Fidelity Investments.

We have known from the Roman days that the best way to continue to screw the country is by distracting the people with mass entertainment.  It is entertainment, not religion, that is the opium of the masses!

I sometimes want to scream that people are idiots.  Oops, did I say that? ;)  Spending is simply not worth it to the taxpayers:

Spending lavishly on a short-lived event is, economically speaking, a dubious long-term strategy. Stadiums, which cost a lot and produce minimal economic benefits, are a particularly lousy line of business. (This is why they are usually built by taxpayers rather than by corporations.)

Not difficult to understand.  Corporations would have spent the money if they knew they were going to make more money than what they invested.  They know a loser when they see stadiums, and they also see losers when they see taxpayers.  They, therefore, get the loser taxpayers to build those loser stadiums!

And then there are reports like this:

There’s just a month to go before the Summer Olympics begin in Rio de Janeiro. And the bad news keeps coming.

Or, this:

One Month Before The Olympic Games in Rio, Everything Is A Disaster

So, hey, enjoy this latest installment of taxpayer-funded debauchery, which will be from August 5th; I will be busy with my summer reading ;)

Source

Socrates dead!

The Brazilian soccer star, thanks to whom even a football nincompoop like me stayed up late in the night to watch the World Cup, has died:

He had been in a critical condition with an intestinal infection since being admitted to intensive care on Friday at a hospital in Sao Paulo.
Socrates, who was widely regarded as one of the greatest ever midfielders, was moved onto a life support machine on Saturday.
He played in two World Cups, won 60 caps for his country between 1979 and 1986 and scored 22 goals.

The following is what I had blogged a year-plus ago:

All I remember from that World Cup was one name: Socrates.  It was a simply awesome tournament ... TV was just about being introduced then in the part of India where I lived, and it was the good ol' newspaper and radio that we had to work with.  I wonder if that made it all the more exciting, come to think of it ...

Guess what happened to Socrates?

Sócrates is a doctor of medicine, a rare achievement for a professional footballer (he is a graduate of the Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto). Even rarer is the fact that he earned the degree while concurrently playing professional football. There are persistent rumours that Sócrates turned out for the University College Dublin. However, the player himself has denied this saying that he has never even been to Dublin^{[citation needed]}.
He is also noted for being an intellectual (he holds a doctorate degree in philosophy), a heavy drinker and smoker, and for his height (193 cm, 6 ft 4 in).

Dev Anand and Socrates on the same day :(

Read this without cracking a smile. Come on, try :)

Going Brazilian might take on a whole new meaning after this one:

Brazilian fingers wife in venomous vagina murder plot

A Brazilian man has claimed his wife attempted to kill him by putting poison into her vagina and inviting him to drink from the furry cup.
The unnamed husband, from São José do Rio Preto, in the state of São Paulo, told cops he and his missus had an argument. She then allegedly doused her privates with a "toxic substance" before suggesting her other half eat at the Y.
Luckily for the intended victim, he smelt something fishy before diving in, and thwarted the cunning cunnilingual plan.
Given the "unusual" nature of the case, officer Walter Colacino Júnior, of Rio Preto's 4th Police District, has decided to probe deeper into the matter before taking any action.

Source

What if Argentina wins it all?:)

A dream final will feature Brazil and Argentina.

But if Argentina wins, and if Maradona fulfils his promise, then we will all have to bear witness to him running naked in central Buenos Aires .... aaaaahhhh :)

Meanwhile, the NY Post sums up the US' loss to Ghana .... ah, the tabloid headlines .... (ht)

Remember the "Lambada"? :)

Olympics final score: Pele 1, Obama 0

I mean, did Obama really think there would not be any spin on his trip, particularly when there was a distinct possibility that Rio would be awarded the games?

I think this was the dumbest thing Obama and his advisers have done, yet.  I hope this will be the last one.  There are some issues that even during normal times a President should completely stay away from, and this is one of those.

And, BTW, I am really happy that the US will not host the 2016 Olympics.  It is the most doggone awful waste of money ever.  If the market wants that, well and good. But, to waste tax dollars on it? No way!!!

But, what's up with Pele crying about this?  The soccer magician getting too soft in his older years? :-)

Will we be able to feed 9.5 billion people?

The Aspen Ideas Festival is over. You nor I went to that one means that apparently we did not have ideas that anybody wanted to listen to, or we did not have the money to listen to those with ideas! Oh well ....

James Fallows was one of those that the attendees wanted to listen to, and has blogged about a session he moderated; it was on "Feeding the World's Billions." Fallows writes:

Sample alarming fact: if the world population eventually tops out at 9.5 billion, 50% more than now, total food production will probably have to grow by 200%, as people eat higher up the food chain and demand more and more meat. The challenge, as several panelists put it, was to produce three times as much food on no more than the current amount of agricultural land. (About why it won't just work to cut down all remaining forests to grow food, see here.)

Sample specific solution-possibilities, or at least interesting facts: Average yields in U.S. farms are roughly three times as high as the overall average for Mexico, India, and Brazil. If those countries got to even two-thirds of the US level, it would make a huge difference in closing the "grain gap." Also: a huge share of the world's food output is wasted -- in the developing world because it rots and spoils before it can get to market, and in the US to a significant degree because of restaurant waste. Thus easy opportunities for gain.

I am sure the neo-Malthusians will be all over this one in no time at all ....

Barack Obama in Brazil--all six of them!

Welcome to Obama-mania, Brazil-style. Few countries have embraced the idea of the US's first black president as enthusiastically as Brazil, a country with one of the largest Afro-descendant populations on Earth yet where black faces remain a minority in politics. Obama T-shirts are everywhere while chat shows and newspaper columns are filled with talk of the 47-year-old Illinois senator.

Now even Brazil's politicians are lining up for their piece of the pie. Due to a quirk of Brazilian law, candidates are allowed to run under the name of their choice. As a result, at least six Brazilian politicians have officially renamed themselves "Barack Obama" in a bid to get an edge over their rivals in October's municipal elections.

"In truth it was an accident," says Belford Roxo's Obama, an IT consultant who is bidding to become the city's first black mayor. "I'd been on the television wearing a suit and people thought I looked a bit like him so they started calling me Barack Obama. They'd see me in the street and shout: 'Hey! Barack!" So I decided to register it."

Read the full news report in The Guardian.

ps: Makes you think more and more about "Latin America", doesn't it?