So nobody's watching the Olympics. According to Nielsen, the Rio Olympics opening ceremony dropped

28% from the London Olympic ceremony in 2012, and that wasn't an aberration. The kickoff of

Olympic competition earned 19.5 million viewers between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m., which was a 32% drop

from the London Olympics. There are a bunch of reasons why the Olympics seem less interesting

every single cycle. First, nobody ever talks about the home country. It would actually

be interesting and worthwhile to critique why exactly there have been so many problems in recent

Olympics, like dogs being killed on the streets in Sochi, Russia, or massive pollution in China

and Brazil. It would be kind of interesting to know why the opening

ceremonies at the Olympics this year looked like a dystopian future filmed in 1970s

technicolor, sort of like the gang meetup and the warriors sort of look like. There's a reason

behind that. These countries are run as massive government dictatorships. Brazil is a corrupt

petro oligarchy and oil oligarchy, and it's run like that. But we never hear about that. All we hear about is that Olympic kayakers are reportedly running into couches in the middle of their races, really in the middle of the river, thanks to a trash buildup. That actually apparently happened, which is awesome. This makes the Olympics themselves seem trashy rather than just the home countries. Second, the Unity of Nations gobbledygook.

While the Lebanese national athletes refuse to sit on the same bus as the Jews, the Olympics

keep marketing themselves as a one-world organization, something along the lines of Disneyland's

it's a small world, except that what made the Olympics interesting in years past was the international

rivalry. If you watch Miracle, and imagine that the U.S. hockey team just played Finland and then skipped right over the Soviet Union, there wouldn't be anything there worth filming. In a games with no villains, there really can't be any heroes. Third, the media are super annoying. First of all, they talk too much. Second, instead of just home teaming it and rooting for the U.S., the media feel the need to play neutral at the Olympics, which is super annoying and irritating.

Nobody cares about the comedy of nations.

We need a rooting interest, that's all.

Pretending that we ought to simply shrug when dictatorial nations win medals and say, yay, great achievement.

Rather than getting annoyed by it, should kind of annoy us.

More than that, the media not along with manufactured stories

like an American fencer wearing a hijab, yay, while ignoring legitimate stories like those Israelis

...