Aaron Rodgers- Garbage in, garbage out
Aaron Rodgers- Garbage in, garbage out
Turns out that being an NFL quarterback makes you an expert on precisely nothing...save for throwing a football
While there wasn’t anything behind the speculation that NY Jets QB Aaron Rodgers had been on the shortlist to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s VP candidate, Rodgers makes for engaging copy. Sure, there’s the “Rodgers the anti-vaxxer” angle or the “Rodgers the counter-culture guru” story.
Then there’s the “Aaron Rodgers breaking stories on the Pat McAfee Show” bit or the “Yeah, Aaron Rodgers can be a bit of a prick sometimes” story. And while the idea of Rodgers as VP is pretty weird, it’s not even the strangest aspect of this saga.
While there is pretty much no chance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becoming president of anything other than Negative48 (the Texas QAnon cult that hangs around Dallas waiting for his dead relatives to show up), he is nonetheless taking his campaign very seriously. In fact, he recently put it out there that he will announce his running mate on March 26 and that football player Aaron Rodgers and former wrestler/Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura are at the top of his list. Unfortunately, Kyrie Irving is only 31, so he will have to wait until the next election to be the running mate in some nepo baby’s vanity campaign.
….RFK Jr. could probably do whole a lot worse than Jesse Ventura, given his own lunacy. At least Ventura was correct about the Iraq War, LGBTQ+ rights, and marijuana legalization before a lot of other people were, and he supports abortion rights and Medicare For All, is anti-war, was in favor of COVID restrictions and tried to unionize the WWF. He also told Virginia that if they wanted their treason flag back, which his state of Minnesota seized while kicking their asses, that it was Minnesota’s “heritage” now.
Rodgers, on the other hand, may be wackier than Kennedy himself. He’s an anti-vaxxer who has claimed that Jimmy Kimmel was on Epstein’s Lolita Express, that Ayahuasca, a hallucinogen, is not a drug because it comes from a plant (unlike, say, weed, shrooms, opium or cocaine) and he puts the toothpaste directly in his mouth before brushing, which is just all kinds of wrong.
Aaron Rodgers may be a future Hall of Fame quarterback, but he IS a bit odd and dickish. And when I say dickish, well, what else might you call this?
Earlier this week, CNN published an article asserting that Rodgers had been known to say that Sandy Hook was fake — co-written by Pamela Brown, one of the people he said that to.
Via CNN:
Brown was covering the Kentucky Derby for CNN in 2013 when she was introduced to Rodgers, then with the Green Bay Packers, at a post-Derby party. Hearing that she was a journalist with CNN, Rodgers immediately began attacking the news media for covering up important stories. Rodgers brought up the tragic killing of 20 children and 6 adults by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School, claiming it was actually a government inside job and the media was intentionally ignoring it.
When Brown questioned him on the evidence to show this very real shooting was staged, Rodgers began sharing various theories that have been disproven numerous times.
Today, Rodgers denied that this incident or another ever occurred, swearing that he has always believed that Sandy Hook was real.
“As I’m on the record saying in the past, what happened in Sandy Hook was an absolute tragedy,” he wrote on Twitter. “I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place. Again, I hope that we learn from this and other tragedies to identify the signs that will allow us to prevent unnecessary loss of life. My thoughts and prayers continue to remain with the families affected along with the entire Sandy Hook community.”
Granted, I’m unfamiliar with what he has or hasn’t said about the Sandy Hook mass shooting, so I’ll give him a break. I do know that Aaron Rodgers is known for saying some pretty outrageous and off-the-wall stuff. Questioning the validity of the Sandy Hook mass shooting, while certainly offensive, wouldn’t necessarily be out of his wheelhouse.
Rodgers is also known for liking truly off-the-wall, batshit insane tweets. The man has a penchant for conspiracy theories and unproven “scientific” claims, which he’d undoubtedly attribute to having an “open mind” or something similar. Yeah, science can be so overrated at times.
As for odd, well, it doesn’t get much more so than this:
He has other health tips as well, revolving around things he calls “modalities” (“modalities” is Alternative Medicine for “varieties of things that don’t actually work”). One of them is listening to dolphins fucking.
Yes, you read that correctly—”dolphins fucking.”
And there you have today’s coffee-spew moment.
You’re welcome.
“There’s ideas that some of the noises from the dolphins when they’re love-making, the frequency of that is actually healing to the body,” Rodgers said during an ESPN podcast.
On the bright side, as far as we know, he has not gone full Margaret Howe Lovatt.
Thankfully, this whole thing is imaginary and it is highly unlikely that Rodgers will be moving his dolphin tank and hyperbaric chamber into the Naval Observatory any time soon.
Of course, being the sick bastard I am, I couldn’t let go of the idea of the frequency of “dolphins when they’re lovemaking…that is actually healing to the body.” The tendency, of course, is to scoff at that as either weird or voyeuristic, so I went to a June 11, 2014, article in the Atlantic about a 1960s NASA-funded experiment.
In 1964, a researcher named Margaret Howe Lovatt was conducting an experiment in which she attempted to teach a dolphin named Peter how to communicate with humans.
She literally moved in with him for three months, sleeping next to the tank, and working on a desk that hung over the water where he swam. They spent a great deal of time together, and as Peter was a sexually maturing adolescent dolphin, he often had sexual urges at inconvenient times.
As it turns out, it's very difficult to teach a dolphin to talk when he is aroused. Lovatt found that Peter "would rub himself on my knee, my foot or my hand." She allowed it, "I wasn't uncomfortable — as long as it wasn't too rough. It was just easier to incorporate that and let it happen, it was very precious and very gentle, Peter was right there, he knew that I was right there."
Eventually, Peter’s sexual urges- he’d become quite enamored of Ms. Lovatt- were becoming a serious impediment to the work she was attempting to do. Before long, she determined there was only one way to deal with Peter’s urges expediently- she would deal with them herself.
In order to satisfy Peter's increasing sexual urges, he would be transported to another pool with two female dolphins. This was a logistical nightmare and it disrupted his communication lessons constantly. Eventually, Lovatt took it upon herself to relieve Peter of his urges, rather than going through the long and inconvenient process of transporting him, "It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch, just get rid of that scratch and we would be done and move on."
Sexual acts between dolphins and humans have a history. Malcolm Brenner wrote the book Wet Goddess about his nine-month long relationship with a dolphin. At the Nottingham Trent University, Dr. Mark Griffiths has studied delphinophiles (humans sexually attracted to dolphins.)
So, we just learned more about sexual acts between humans and dolphins than we needed or wanted, yeah? I certainly did. That’s the way I feel about Aaron Rodgers. Whenever there’s a story about him, whether in the sports or mainstream press, I feel like I’ve learned something about him I neither needed nor wanted to know.
Outside of the fact that he’s a quarterback who’ll no doubt be in the Hall of Fame five years after he retires, his public persona comes across as just plain weird. Whether he’s spending a month in a hole in the ground in southern Oregon, dabbling in the truths revealed by ayahuasca, or listening to dolphins fucking, it’s just weird.
Weird isn’t bad, but I’m not sure what it proves.
Of course, the fact that Rodgers spent most of his career playing for the Green Bay Packers automatically leads me to not look favorably upon him, but neither is he a sympathetic character in any other respect.
He didn’t help his case when he, without citing any evidence, promoted a claim that immigrants who speak Chinese or Spanish are looking to join the US military and then potentially turn on the country. He went on to say that Congress is encouraging this sort of betrayal.
I wonder if he’s he noticed what Republicans on Capitol Hill are up to these days?
Rodgers was referring to the Courage to Serve Act, a bipartisan bill before Congress that would expedite a process that already exists for immigrants who serve in the military to obtain citizenship. There’s nothing new, sinister, or potentially threatening in the process.
If someone’s willing to serve and perhaps even fight for this country, they deserve citizenship at the very least.
Immigrants without US citizenship have long served in our military and have been rewarded by the government with citizenship for their service.
It’s difficult to say what drives Aaron Rodgers, but it’s clear he marches to a drum few hear. In most cases, there’s nothing wrong with that, but people can get hurt when he drifts into conspiracies. Perhaps he doesn’t realize or care, but whether for good or ill, people pay attention to him.
I don’t know why; Rodgers is a professional athlete, not a Nobel laureate. It’s not like he’s promoting world peace, curing diseases, or splitting atoms, but people listen to what he says for whatever reason.
Even if what he says is 98% garbage, which is probably being generous.
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