There is a lot rattling around in site co-founder Brandon Andreasen’s head. He can’t spend 5000 words on everything that he wants to, because it would heavily interfere in his time normally spent drinking, watching King of the Hill reruns, and just generally being lazy. So every week, Brandon is going to do a scattershot of smaller stories he won’t commit to writing full stories about.
Ted Cruz Is An Idiot: Part 8,128,903
Everyone’s favorite dumpy uncle who has gotten scammed by three ponzi schemes has decided to go and run his mouth, again. Ted Cruz, whose main existence was to make Jeb Bush seem likeable in 2016, said on Saturday that he thinks that the Supreme Court should repeal same sex marriage. Remember when, after Roe vs. Wade was overturned, everyone was concerned that Republicans were going to come for gay marriage next, and then every conservative said “nooooo, we would never do that,” well that lasted all of three weeks.
Cruz said this on his Youtube channel, because life is a farce and Andy Warhol was wrong, 15 minutes is far too short of a time for human cold sores like Cruz when they have so many available methods to ejaculate their dumb opinions. “Obergefell, like Roe vs. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nations history. Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Oergefell, some states were moving to allow gay marriage, other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. These were different standards than the state was adopting.”
He would later add” In Obergefell, the court said No, we know better than you guys do, and now every state must, must sanction and permit gay marriage.”
Yes, that is correct you fucking cancer on society. It had to be a federal law because shit stains like you and your constituents in that godforsaken desert can’t be trusted to do the right thing. Of course, Cruz says the constitution states that laws like this should be left to the states. You will also recognize Cruz as the person who has a public tantrum whenever states enact tougher gun laws because it makes him look worse, or, it would make him look worse if you didn’t realize that he has no problem with a bunch of children getting murdered in a school in his state.
You will also recognize Cruz as someone who goes to great lengths to shove his religious beliefs down everyone’s throats, something that the constitution isn’t big about, either.
This is the part of the post where I like to remind everyone that the religious right are the ones who claim constant persecution that doesn’t exist. They are also usually the ones that claim that America is soft because kids get participation trophy, but don’t see the irony that they stormed the Capitol on January 6th because they didn’t get their participation trophy from voting. While they claim to want a peaceful country, they are the one shaking the bird cage relentlessly, then claiming to be the victim when they get bit. IN short, the religious right wants an idyllic society, but only on their terms. That means everyone should be able to get married, as long as it’s a man marrying a woman. As has been shown so many times, they are totally fine if the woman is underage because they don’t believe women deserve their own rights.
It should also say quite a bit that Ted Cruz is considered a power player amongst this sect of society. Ted Cruz would have been tarred and feathered in other eras of society for being a dullard and a ponce.
What’s more dangerous, though, is how casually he is saying it. It’s one thing if Margorie Taylor Greene or Lauren “I used to be an escort who got brought into politics by Ted Cruz” Boebert say something stupid, because everyone with an IQ above 40 know that they are idiots. That they were voted into political office says way more about the failings of that congressional district’s school systems than anything else. Ted Cruz is considered a perennial fringe presidential candidate. He is one of the guys who the Republican party puts front and center on television shows because he is, in essence, their coalmine canary. They let him go out and say stuff to get a feel on where the changing winds are. If Cruz said this, then that means there are power brokers in DC already trying to figure out how to get the Supreme Court to overturn it.
Cruz did go on to say that he doesn’t think it will happen because so many people are already married and that it would be logistically difficult. At no point did he mention that it might be harmful to same sex couples who live in garbage states like Texas, Florida, and pretty much every other state that has an SEC college football team. He doesn’t care who this will hurt. He doesn’t care whose life would be ruined. He only cares about the logistics of how hard it would be to herd up same sex married couples and ship them out of his state.
Trust me, there is a reason for all of this. IF they can manage to overturn Obergefell, they will take advantage of it to the fullest of their abilities. Their goal is to drive people out of their states. States like Texas and Florida don’t want the LGBTIA+ community in their state. They don’t want anything other than right wing Christians. If they are the only ones there, they can enact any and all laws that they want. They can stuff the local and national government with their people. There will be no resistance. That’s the society Ted Cruz wants. Fuck Ted Cruz. Forever and always.
The Juan Soto Contract Situation Is More Than Meets the Eye
If you have been paying attention to the baseball hot stove as the league goes into the All Star break, then you have heard about the contract negotiations between the Washington Nationals and star outfielder Juan Soto. If you haven’t, here is the gist: The Nationals offered Soto, who is 23 years old, a 15 year/420 million dollar contract to stay with the team through his age 38 season.
If you are a baseball outsider, that seems like an absolutely insane amount of money. And it is. But like so many things in life, the devil is in the details.
Soto has been in the league since he was 19 years old, which means he is already considered a veteran, even though there were players drafted in this weekend’s MLB draft that are already older than him. His credentials already speak for themselves. He has already been named to two All Star Games. He has two Silver Slugger awards, and he has been in the top 10 in MVP voting in three consecutive seasons. He has unbelievable plate discipline, leading MLB in walks last season when he was the only player on the team worth a damn. He already has 118 home runs in his career and it’s not a stretch to believe that he could end his career with over 525 home runs and an on base percentage over .400. How many people have done that in baseball history? Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, and that’s it.
Soto is in statistically rare air. Only Mike Trout is tracking on the same pace historically among active players. So needless to say, Soto is set to break the bank on a new contract. And the Nationals are leaking all of the contract details during negotiations to make Juan and his agent Scott Boras look greedy.
The issue at hand is this: Soto is one of the five best players in baseball, but the Nationals only want to pay him like he is the 20th highest paid player in baseball, and by spreading the contract out over 15 years, he will inevitably see numerous players pass him by financially while he is anchored to his contract.
Beyond that, in spite of growing revenue in baseball year after year that is turning even the lowliest teams into 1.5 billion dollar valuations, the Lerner family that owns the Nationals have dictated that some of the contract be deferred out even further than the 15 years so not only would they be giving him a below market contract, they would be giving Soto even less money on a yearly basis.
The reason some teams do this isn’t that they can’t afford the contract, but they would rather make even more money on it. Since MLB contracts are guaranteed, unlike in the NFL, some teams attempt to take part of the contract they would have to pay out anyway, and invest it and profit off the dividend.
In case you are wondering if this ever backfires, then you obviously don’t know why we celebrate Bobby Bonilla Day every July 1st.
After 1999, the Mets were trying to get out from under Bobby Bonilla’s contract and the 5.9 million they owed him, so they made a deal with him: you leave now and we’ll pay you 1.2 million a year for 25 years, starting in 2011. The owners of the Mets, the Wilpon family, made this deal because they were sure they would make the money 10x over and it really wouldn’t cost them anything because they had a guy who they trusted in wealth management who told them it would happen. That guy? Bernie Madoff, who died about a decade into a 150 year prison sentence for running one of the largest ponzi schemes in history.
It should also be noted that three people who would be making more than Soto are former teammates of his: Max Scherzer, Bryce Harper, and Anthony Rendon. The Nationals had all the makings of being one of the most dominant teams in Major League Baseball with a core that was the envy of other teams. But the Lerner family, the ones who own the team and are leaking the contract negotiations to make Soto look bad, are notorious cheap asses. Instead of paying their homegrown players, they trade them or let them go in free agency as soon as the players become expensive. They exemplify the edict that winning isn’t important. Making money is.
Soto will be traded sometime in the next two weeks. He will most likely end up on a deep pocketed team like the Mets, whose new owner Steve Cohen is hellbent on winning a championship regardless of how much he spends. Hopefully Soto stays healthy and earns every bit of the nearly 600 million dollars he is destined to make. It’s just a shame that there is a portion of MLB fandom that will lament when players stayed on the same team for their entire career. They will blame the players. They always do. Which is a shame.
Feud Of The Week: Zack Snyder vs. Warner Brothers
So i’m out of my element here, as someone who doesn’t have the time or energy to watch every super hero movie because I have a social life. So i’m going to try to decipher this as best as possible, while showing as little respect as humanly possible to everyone involved.
Zack Snyder, who as best I can tell, is most famous for directing Soul Asylum’s “Somebody To Shove” music video (not their best, but then again, nothing was ever going to beat Runaway Train) directed a super hero movie called “Justice League.” It wasn’t particularly popular, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 39%.
What little I know about super hero canon leads me to believe this is some kind of hermaphroditic mish mash of a couple different movies. It has a Batman. There appears to be Batman and his elderly sexual servant Alfred as well. Aquaman is there. I assume Wolverine and Gambit are in it too, but i’m sick of staring at the IMDB. Remember when movies were about Wars in the Stars, and kids who broke their arm and then were magically able to throw the ball really fast and started playing for the Chicago Cubs? Yea, I miss those days, too.
Anyway, virgins everywhere hated the movie. Snyder, who apparently also directed Rod Stewart’s “Leave Virginia Alone” video, hated the movie. He had a four hour cut of the movie that would rock worlds. Not rock like the ZZ Top video “World of Swirl” but rock nonetheless. In 2021, after years of people losing their minds online over wanting to see a four hour cut of a movie they have already seen, and i’ll reiterate, it is a four hour cut, it was released on HBO Max.
It seems like everyone got what they wanted and that’s that. End of story. Not quite. As it turns out, the rabid fervor in which absolute fucking losers fans wanted to see the movie lead to a litany of toxic online behavior, including death threats to studio executives, up to and including photo renderings of decapitated execs with their children tagged in the pictures. You know, TOTALLY NORMAL STUFF.
Anyway, Warner Brothers Media commissioned multiple reports to find out where all of this absolute fucking batshit toxic online behavior was coming from. As it turns out, it was quite a few bot accounts. And by quite a few, it was roughly 15 percent of all online interaction on the topic.
Rolling Stone obtained a number of reports from Warner Brothers that showed that quite a bit of the frothing online was not only from bot accounts, but was from bot accounts that may have been funded by Snyder himself. This is truly some next level dorkery here.
Obviously, this isn’t different from a tactic used by politicians to use shill accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media to try to drum up support for a cause or ire towards a target. There is a cottage industry of businesses that can cause this kind of online disruption. The problem might be more about the fact that Snyder didn’t do nearly as well of a job hiding his tracks as others do when they engage in this kind of behavior.
That said, i’m not nearly as concerned about the 15% of bot accounts harassing people who didn’t think a movie should be FOUR FUCKING HOURS LONG. It’s the 85% that were actual people that, again, WANTED TO SEE A FOUR HOUR LONG CUT OF A SUPER FUCKING HERO MOVIE SO HARD THEY SENT DEATH THREATS TO PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A BAD IDEA.
Of course, it’s worth noting that this kind of thing didn’t happen back in the day because most of the people that would do this would be busy sitting around just thinking it, but literally never having the balls to say it to the person they are talking about. Just another case of internet courage.
Top Three Prolapsed Anuses of the Week
3: Roger Goodell-Reports are that the NFL does not plan to punish the Houston Texans for helping to enable Deshaun Watson’s behavior when he was reportedly sexually harassing/assaulting over 20 masseuses in the greater Houston area. It isn’t because the Texans aren’t responsible. It’s because Goodell is too gutless to hold owners responsible for their behavior.
2: Jerry Reinsdorf-Tony LaRussa still hasn’t been fired. Reinsdorf will stay on this list until he is.
1: Vicente Gonzalez-Fuck off with paying bloggers because you are too much of a coward to call your opponent something racist that you are obviously thinking, but not saying, you wax figure looking fuck.
Dead Person of the Week
Guglielmo Marconi was the 1st marquee of Marconi. Which I suppose means i’m the 1st marquee of Andreasen. He was also an inventor. He created a radio station for the pope, which was apparently a fella named Pius XI. I’m not sure if the 11th Pius was any good as a pope, but my only other frames of reference for the roman numeral XI are the Super Bowl and Wrestlemania. Super Bowl XI wasn’t particularly interesting, with the Raiders taking a 16-0 lead into half time and cruising to a 32-14 victory. Wrestlemania XI is generally considered one of the worst of all time, with it being headlined by Bam Bam Bigelow losing a gimmick match to Lawrence Taylor. So, i’m sure Pius XI wasn’t anything to write home about.
What the hell am I doing here? OH yea, Marconi. He was able to turn radio wave technology and turned that into wireless telegraphing, a long precursor to international phone calls. He won a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909, which is pretty neat.
When the Titanic sank, the only reason any ships knew to come looking for survivors was because the ship had Marconi’s technology and an operator on board. So if Marconi had invented iceberg detecting technology, we wouldn’t have had to watch Kate Winslet murder Leonardo Dicaprio at the end of the movie.
Of course, Marconi didn’t live by the edict “you either die a hero or live long enough to become a villian” as he would become an avowed fascist, so much so that Mussolini named him to Italy’s Fascist Grand Council. He would become the president of the Royal Academy of Italy, where he took great pride in not letting Jewish students into the academy. It should also be noted he was doing this before that piss ant Hitler came to power.
He died in 1937. Good.
What Song Became Classic Rock This Week
It’s a known fact that music becomes classic after 20 years. Well, what song was released 20 years ago that is now officially classic rock?
Every Counting Crows song was basically released to exist in the classic rock universe for the rest of time. Mr. Jones was on classic rock radio roughly eight minutes after it was released. Big Yellow Taxi is a bit more a deep cut, but it is no doubt a classic rock song. It is basically any of REO Speedwagon’s songs, but done by a guy who tabloids say was inside every female celebrity of the mid 90’s.
The song is a cover an Joni Mitchell song, which sounds like a sped up version of “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard.” This is one of those rare occasions where I prefer the cover over the original, along with Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” and Marilyn Manson’s cover of the old Dolly Parton song “I Don’t Like the Drugs (but the drugs like me).”
What To Look Out For This Week
1: Ron DeSantis will get his head stuck in an alligator. He will blame this on Disney before settling on blaming it on Trans Alligators. He will ban same sex alligator marriage and invest 350 million to have an anti-gay alligator tax force.
2: NFL Teams will report to training camp. You will be subjected to every idiot from your fan base claiming this is the year your team shocks everybody and wins the Super Bowl. Unless your team is based in Los Angeles, Kansas City, Buffalo, Tampa Bay, or MAYBE Indianapolis or Denver, your team has no chance at winning the Super Bowl.
3: Those same idiots are going to spend the next few days cry babying about their favorite player’s Madden rating, because life is truly, utterly pointless.
4: Rage Against the Machine will continue touring. People will continue to be confused that their music is very anti-conservative. Those people will run back to the comfort of their Brooks and Dunn albums, until they realize Brooks and Dunn love weed. With nothing left to believe in, they will run back to their one true feeling of salvation: harassing Chrissy Teigen online.
Fancy Boys Club 