We went Christmas shopping today. You know, the passe tradition of leaving one’s house, mixing with fellow citizens, and purchasing presents for the holiday season.

The combination of COVID overkill and digital ease – how much less effort is required to click a mouse button to make a purchase – have wounded but not outright killed the traditional way of shopping.

I’m here to tell you there are benefits to the old way.

Begin with running into acquaintances and catching up, as the wife did on one stop.

Add in the ability to touch and feel the merchandise – impossible digitally.

Plus, and this is a big one, you just might run into a surprisingly good deal.

The wife and I did exactly that on several occasions.

At Walmart, the clearance section had one desirable toy, an LOL playhouse, but it was not marked with a price. Then came Newton, a friendly worker sort who was only too glad to price check it for us. When that number came back about 50 percent lower than the same item elsewhere, it quickly found its way into the shopping cart.

Let me interject at this point that the plastic snow sliders that used to be almost everywhere, have been hard to find of late. Or, when you do happen on them, they are ridiculously overpriced as if they were formed of precious metals, not a hydrocarbon product.

Perhaps kids don’t want to risk going outside and chilling their extremities by sled riding, so they sit in front of a computer monitor, playing a sled-riding game.

Yeah, that’s progress.

Because we have granddaughters ages 5 and nearly 4, and because they have been hooked by Disney vehicles including the Frozen franchise, the wife and I were cheered to find Frozen saucer sleds on the discount rack.

Again, no price. Again, enter Newton, to proclaim a good deal. And Newton made sure I got his name so I might be able to reference his pricing act should the cashier not ring up the correct amount.

This is another bonus of shopping in-person, meeting cheerful and helpful people.

On yet another stop, there was a 15-percent across-the-board discount promised on toys, which made for some more compelling purchases. Also, while roaming around this facility I came across some interesting merchandise.

It appealed to me and just might appeal to the kids. It was a microscope and telescope packaged together, again for a seemingly ridiculously low price and under the label of National Geographic.

As a kid who grew up consuming the soft porn offered in school libraries by National Geographic magazine and its pictures of topless native women around the world, I respect the National Geographic brand.

But I wanted to contemplate this, so we went to dinner, eating free on a gift card from the son and his family honoring a recent anniversary.

NOTE: You don’t ease into a restaurant between shopping stops when you’re sitting at home mouse manipulating.

While we ate, the wife did some quick cell phone searching on the telescope-microscope offering. And, as I had thought, this discount store was just about giving it away.

We finished eating, stopped again at that store, and purchased this educational toy the kids might find appealing.

Yes, I’ve done some Christmas shopping earlier on the Internet. I’m neither a technophobe, nor a Luddite.

But I do like to keep traditions alive, and we did that today.

The game 20 questions was one of my favorites as a youth growing up in an era before video games, 250-channel satellite television packages, cell phones and all manner of personal music listening devices.

Simply put, more often than not we had to entertain ourselves, and maybe sharpen our minds in the process. Playing 20 questions honed deductive reasoning skills as well as encouraging creativity in trying to stump the questioners with difficult subject picks.

To recap the game, a person decides on something animal, vegetable or mineral – we went by person, place or thing – and the other players have 20 questions to root out the answer. They must be yes or no questions. They must be answered honestly.

Today I’m offering a variation, in which I ask 20 questions of readers designed to encourage thought, not find one answer.

1. Is any knowledgeable sports fan surprised today that the U.S. men are on the outside looking in at the World Cup, having exited in the round of 16?
2. Why would anyone be stunned that the LameStream media is burying the release of Twitter documentation that there was a conscious effort there to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story?
3. Why is it OK for White House propaganda mouthpiece Karine Jean-Pierre to flat-out lie to the media, such as falsely saying Clueless Joe Biden has visited the border with Mexico while president?
4. Anyone else notice that the familiar unholy alliance of left-wing politicians and LameStream media are going on full attack mode regarding one-time leftist darling Elon Musk simply because he is sharing facts?
5. Considering the NFL is a professional league, why are there so many mediocre and just plain bad teams in it?
6. Who prepares the list Clueless Joe Biden refers to so often during press conference regarding the people he is allowed to call upon to ask questions?
7. In view of the scenes of worker abuse at plants in China, why aren’t more questioning Apple’s cushy relationship with the ChiComs?
8. How much military aid to Ukraine is enough considering the U.S. already has sent about $20 billion under the Biden regime, or about one-third of the annual Russian defense budget in 2021?
9. When will we start to demand accountability and fully audit all that cash thrown into Ukraine, a country that even Clueless Joe Biden once identified as extremely corrupt?
10. Will the politicized findings of the Jan. 6 committee be buried like the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop?
11. Are you better off today than you were when Clueless Joe Biden first was guided into the Oval Office?
12. Don’t you just want to puke when pretty boy Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau praises China protesters after having done all he could – legally and extra-legally – to squelch any sort of protest by Canadian citizens against his reign of control?
13. Should we be surprised by yet another study finding that masks, even the heralded N95 variety, do little to suppress the spread of COVID?
14. Dare we dream that Anthony Fauci will be called to account for all the COVID mistruths he perpetrated in his self-declared role of Mr. Science?
15. Will the shift of the Democratic Party to the left stop at replicating here the Mao regime in China, or move past it?
16. Isn’t it totally predictable that Antifa would be outraged by a Florida rally to protest sexualization of children?
17. Has anyone else noted how often photos emerge of Bill Clinton with disgraced types such as Jeffrey Epstein and Sam Bankman-Fried?
18. Whatever happened to Epstein, Vince Foster, Seth Rich and Ron Brown?
19. Would you underwrite a life insurance policy on Bankman-Fried?
20. Do you believe in Santa Claus, that Elvis remains alive and that the Federal Reserve can engineer a soft economic landing despite raising interest rates at a record pace?

Today’s topic is ORC and it’s costing you money even if you know not what it is.

It sounds like Ork, the mythical planet home of Mork from the Mork And Mindy television series starring comic Robin Williams, but there is nothing funny about ORC.

ORC also might sound like the noise your dog makes when upchucking table scraps and it is about as revolting.

ORC is shorthand for Organized Retail Crime, a phenomenon catalyzed by defund-the-police, don’t prosecute-criminals types who dominate the political left.

In California, where thieves can steal merchandise without fear of legal action as long as they keep the total under $950, surprise, there is much organized retail crime.

In Portland, Oregon, where Black Lives Matter types were allowed to burn public buildings while being free to wall off parts of the city for their compounds, stores are closing because they cannot sell enough merchandise to offset the loss from thefts.

Even national retailer Target has come forward with statistical evidence of the crime spree, noting in a recent quarterly report that it has lost approximately $400 million in the past year to shoplifting. Tellingly, that’s up 50 percent from the previous year and the majority of it is being characterized as organized retail crime.

Repeat, retail theft up 50 percent in a year at Target.

No wonder a report on this posted to zerohedge.com spoke of the thin veneer of civility being stripped from society.

Chicago, “benefiting” from easy-on-criminals legislation in Illinois, is experiencing more than 100 car thefts a day, up from an average of 35 or so in the first half of the year. Shootings also continue at a great rate.

It’s as clear as the blank stare on Clueless Joe’s face that coddling criminals emboldens them and makes life less safe for the rest of us.

And yet the moronic electorate continues to vote for Democrats as long as they promise stimulus handouts and relief from having to live up to debt obligations, fully support killing babies, legalize weed, pump oil from the strategic petroleum reserve trying to suppress gasoline prices, and continue to praise aberrant sexual behavior.

You, dear reader, pay for all this. Speaking specifically about ORC, you pay more for each and every item you buy in order for the stores to offset all the free merchandise stolen with a wink and a nod of approval from soft-on-crime Democrats.

As long as Democrats keep getting elected to positions of power, these trends will continue and, more to the point, will accelerate to even worse levels.

The televised interview of disgraced FTX cryptocurrency exchange wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried Wednesday was not as pathetic as your typical Clueless Joe Biden brain freeze or John Fetterman debate, but that doesn’t mean it was a favorable performance by SBF (as the failed financier is known by friends and foes alike).

Reading a summation of it all today on zerohedge.com, legal types noted numerous incriminating statements made by SBF and at least 12 times he apologized or admitted failure.

I watched this SBF circus live yesterday because I was shocked that a supposedly brilliant person would go on cable television to discuss his many failures running a financial concern, with all the likely attendant litigation yet to come, both civil and criminal.

It also interested me to see exactly now tough the questioning would be from the host, a long-time liberal apologist from CNBC. It is notable that among SBF’s many proclivities that have come to light since his exchange failed was his lavish political donations, almost all to Democrats.

Cynics are wondering aloud if that helped grease the regulatory wheels, despite the fact that one head of an established commodities exchange had testified before Congress against SBF’s exchange.

My take was that the Wednesday SBF interviewer spent too much time apologizing, begging the subject’s indulgence and generally looking to be extremely deferential considering the interview subject’s failures.

A Twitter poll showed 56.9 percent saying the interviewer had “soft-balled it,” while 43.1 percent believe he had “asked the tough questions.”

I wonder what interview that second group was watching, sort of like who are the 40 percent or so of the populace that think Clueless Joe is doing a good job?

SBF’s defense for his failures broke down to, allow me to paraphrase: I’m clueless and didn’t do my job, but I’m really sorry about all the money you people lost due to that.

There were times when the studio audience – SBF was on video from the Bahamas, which he claims he is free to leave, he just chooses not to do so, but there were people in the room with the host – laughed aloud at SBF’s responses, or the questions.

I had no dog in this fight, other than wanting to see right prevail in a general sense. I never got the attraction of cryptocurrency and, missed out on making millions of dollars as the runaway speculation peaked. I’ve also avoided losing any money as the token units have declined in value, been misappropriated by so-called custodians, or have been outright stolen by hackers.

There are many established investment professionals that foresee all cryptocurrencies returning to intrinsic value, that being zero.

Losers in the FTX operation of SBF appear just to have gotten a headstart.

The United States prevailed over Iran Tuesday in a World Cup soccer game dressed up as a morality play.

It is Iran that routinely labels the U.S. “The Great Satan” in foreign policy statements. It is Iran that gets a steady stream of criticism from the world and, of late, from internal demonstrations, regarding poor human rights policies.

Just in the leadup to this game, Iran was angered by a U.S. Soccer post that omitted the emblem of the Islamic Republic from that nation’s flag. And, during a press conference ahead of the game, members of Iranian state media badgered U.S. interview subjects about immigration, racism and inflation.

Lest Iran protest, let me clarify that the U.S. beat a team from the Islamic Republic of Iran, an official name that takes full advantage of poetic license in the use of the term republic. The Authoritarian Theocracy of Iran would be more accurate.

Against that backdrop, it was supremely ironic that the winning – and lone – goal for the U.S. was scored by CHRISTIAN Pulisic, taking down the ISLAMIC Republic of Iran, 1-0.

The U.S. moves on to the round of 16, there to face the Netherlands in a knockout game early Saturday.

Meanwhile, the Iranian team heads home. Considering the punishment back there, where a woman can be slain for not wearing a head covering in public, as happened just this past September (2022, not 1522), this might have been, literally, a do-or-die game for Iran’s players.

No doubt Iran will whine about the lack of a late call in the penalty box, alleging a foul and resulting penalty shot should have been whistled by the referee.

A tie would have advanced Iran in the tournament, so a potential goal there would have been enough to get the job done.

As with most sporting contests, the beauty – or lack thereof – regarding this game was in the eye of the beholder.

U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter was bubbly in his postgame interview and eagerly pointed out his team remains “undefeated.”

While factually correct, it also oversells the reality. The U.S. had scored one goal in two previous games, both ties. The first example was a come-from-ahead tie with Wales, which exited the tournament with a single point, from that tie.

The U.S. also gained a 0-0 tie vs. England, ranked No. 5 in the world, in what was a lethargic effort by both sides.

So, at 1-0-2, the United States is undefeated, but not overly impressive. Two goals in three games is modest. Blowing a 1-0 lead vs. Wales by playing extremely passively in the second half, was disappointing.

This win has been heralded for advancing the U.S. to the 16-team knockout round. As forward Tim Weah observed in a postgame interview, it’s more of “us against the world” because, as he elaborated, no one believes the U.S. can play good soccer.

When you are ranked No. 16 in the world, and advance to the final 16 of the World Cup, that falls more under the category of modest victory, not proof of greatness.

Advancing in knockout play, beginning by beating No. 8 Netherlands, would give something for Weah and Berhalter to crow about.

But all is not sweetness and light regarding Pulisic, the talented forward who hails from Hershey, Pa., Chocolate Town. He was injured while scoring the goal and subsequently crashing into the Iranian goalie. It was reported Pulisic went to a hospital after the game with an abdominal injury.

Considering Pulisic has scored one of the two total U.S. goals in this Cup, and assisted on the other, his presence would seem to be necessary for his team to have any chance against Netherlands.

The U.S. won this game in survival mode, playing what studio analyst and former U.S. men’s team player Alexi Lalas labeled as “shaky” at the end.

That won’t cut it vs. Netherlands. Also, it’s unlikely a single goal will be enough to prevail.

This World Cup experience is likely to end soon for the U.S. men, but, to paraphrase the classic closing line from the movie Casablanca, “We’ll always have Iran (not Paris).”

Men’s soccer is popular in the United States about every four years, when the World Cup transpires and Americans embrace this sport – known as football in the rest of the world – if the U.S. happens to have qualified, which is the case in 2022.

Watching the games transpire can be quite the experience for the folks who don’t live and die with this stuff. Witness my brother, on hand at my house for Thanksgiving and so compelled to take in a bit of a game involving Portugal with one of the world’s top players, Cristiano Ronaldo.

Having seen, for perhaps the 50^th time in this game, a player collapse as if shot and writhe on the ground in apparent agony, my brother was moved to observe in politically incorrect terms that the players were a bit soft.

Understand that the brother’s preference is women’s softball, where the players arguably are much tougher than your average men’s soccer practitioner, so his amazement was duly noted.

For the benefit of my brother and folks like him, in advance of the titanic Tuesday meeting of the United States and Iran, we offer a soccer primer.

First, some World Cup housekeeping. Thirty-two teams are divided into four-team groups and each team plays the other three in the group. Three points are awarded for a win, one for a tie and zero (nil) for a loss.

At the end of the round-robin group play, 16 teams (the top two from each group) advance to a knockout stage in which, blessedly, there are no more ties. A game ending regulation tied moves on to a pair of 15-minute overtime periods. If no one is ahead then, it moves to a shootout, goalie vs. one shooter at a time.

A tradition of soccer, above the kiddie level, is for players absorbing even the most minor physical contact to collapse to the turf and put on a display that would get them thrown out of any credible actors’ workshop for overacting, but is encouraged and even rewarded in soccer.

Sometimes this act gets the alleged causer of the pain issued a yellow card. Get, two and you’re gone from the game.

If the fouling player is judged to have been particularly egregious, a red card is shown. The player is gone and his team plays short-handed.

And, if the foul – yellow card or red – occurs in the 18-yard deep penalty box in front of the goal, then the aggrieved player’s team is awarded a penalty shot, a free chance at the goalie from 12 yards out.

Now you understand the motivation for all the ridiculous overacting. Awarding yellow cards for bad acting, or flopping, might help limit this.

An aside to this flopping is the tendency of goalies, after having made even the most routine save, to fling themselves to ground, looking like someone having completed back-to-back marathons, with a triathlon thrown in for good measure.

Their fatigue is understandable. On a particularly tough night, they might be called upon to make three, maybe four saves.

This is because goal scoring in the typical World Cup game is, shall we say, sparse.

The U.S. and England battled to a titanic 0-0 draw in group play, which was widely heralded as scintillating, gut-wrenching and otherwise riveting. If you watched the game – and I did in its entirety – it was more like two fighters trying to stay away from each other for the duration of their bout and hoping the judges would gift them a win.

Alas, in soccer, there are no judges.

Ties are rampant at the World Cup. Spain and Germany, winners of two of the past three World Cups, slogged to a 1-1 tie Sunday.

Urgency to win is not a soccer theme.

But come Tuesday, the U.S. needs to beat Iran to advance out of group play. Our guys have tied Wales and England to date, so a win would be their first. Two goals would be a watershed scoring moment.

This World Cup has been quite the political stage. German players covered their mouths for a group photo before playing Japan, a lament against the soccer sanctioning body cracking down on social justice warrior actions such as rainbow armbands to protest host Qatar’s stance on gay rights.

The Germans then lost to Japan, prompting more than one wag to suggest the players might have concentrated on the game instead of political statements.

English players took a knee before their game with the U.S., then had trouble getting up the rest of the game, putting on a pathetic display for a team that came into this event ranked fifth in the world.

Iran has come out asking the U.S. be banned from the World Cup for a social media posting by our U.S. Soccer Federation of Iran’s flag without the Islamic Republic emblem – this supposedly to support human rights protesters in Iran.

Despite all this, there are redeeming virtues to soccer games, most notably the fact that the 45-minute halves transpire without television ads or timeouts. Time lost to injuries, or faking, is tacked on to the end of each half by the referee in what is called stoppage time. Usually this is 4-6 minutes.

The games are played in a relatively short amount of time, especially when compared to Major League Baseball or college football.

Now, you are prepared to watch the U.S. either beat Iran Tuesday and move on to knockout play, or be sent home if the result is a tie or loss.

Enjoy the histrionics, on the field and off, and perhaps between the cracks some worthwhile soccer viewing will find its way into the tableau.

Granddaughter Noelle was quizzing my wife Ruby the other day about the proximity of Thanksgiving.

Told it was then two days away, Noelle said that meant she really needed to get started on her list of things for which she is thankful. I can’t wait to hear that list when we sit down at about noon on Thanksgiving for the first feeding of the day.

Along that line, I’ve cobbled up my thankful list, omitting the obvious one about not being a turkey on this day, having given your life in the interest of being the centerpiece of so many feasts.

I’m thankful that Anthony Fauci has taken his considerable ego out of the government bureaucracy, thereby sparing us the Mr. Science talks, even when the science was unproven and Fauci’s view was shifting (see masks, vaccines, etc.). If only he had exited a few years earlier, we’d all be better for it.

I’m also thankful that our family still can afford all the trimmings of a traditional Thanksgiving feast, which reports say has gone up 20 percent under the economic ministrations of Clueless Joe Biden. My wife did yeoman service turning up a turkey in the over-20-pound category, one of the shortages the Biden regime has produced.

I’m thankful that disgraced crypto currency exchange guy Sam Bankman-Fried is not a Republican. If that were the case, we would be subjected to nonstop hysterical wailing from LameStream media and it would take some of the joy out of the holiday. But, because Bankman-Fried is a mammoth contributor to Democratic election causes, his alleged problems keeping his hands off customer’s money is no big deal.

I say thanks nightly that California continues to count votes in the mid-term election for Congress. Just keep on counting as we enter the third week post-election and don’t be at all embarrassed that places like France, Brazil and Iraq can get the votes tabulated the evening of elections.

I’m thankful (and so, too, should be Clueless Joe) that Pennsylvanians saw fit to send unfit John Fetterman to the U.S. Senate, thereby relegating Biden to the second most unqualified politician in Washington, D.C.

I’m thankful that the word finally is out, on the record, about the flood of Filthydelphians to Johnstown, where they take advantage of public housing and some help boost our only growing industry, that being crime.

I’m thankful that Elon Musk posted those pictures of the closet at Twitter full of hashtag Stay Woke T-shirts. And you didn’t believe that Twitter was a full-on socialist operation.

I’m thankful I don’t need to go out Friday and buck the crazed crowds of shoppers – assuming they still exist – to take advantage of Black Friday sales.

I’m thankful that despite the over-the-top spending and customary voting games of the Democrats, they were unable to hold the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, a reality not changed by California’s slow-roll vote counting.

I’m thankful I don’t own stock shares in Tesla, Apple, Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google), all of whom have had come to Jesus moments this year regarding outrageous valuations and runaway spending.

Most of all, I’m thankful for the health and happiness of my family, a fantastic anchor in otherwise troubled times.

As disgusting, abhorrent and sad as mass shootings are, equally so are the efforts by opportunists on the left and their lapdogs in the media to exploit these tragedies.

When do these spin monsters get called on the carpet for politicizing – falsely – such horrific events?

When do they pay the price by being fired, as was the outcome for one AP reporter so eager to incite World War III that he went with a false story about Russians (not Ukrainians) shooting missiles into Poland?

Begin with the shooting at the gay night club in Colorado. Blood still was wet on the floor when the usual suspects were in full song blaming MAGA types, right-wing extremists and any of the left’s political opponents for inciting the incident.

Within days, it has come to light that the alleged shooter is a member of the gay community, with a non-binary gender identity. This is according to documents filed in court by his lawyers.

And the response from all those hate mongers who shot from the lip in fingering Republicans for inspiring the shooting has been, at least in some cases, to question whether this is just a legal ploy to avoid charges of a hate crime.

This whole hate crime concept is ridiculous. If someone murders someone, can’t we just have them executed upon conviction, or at least jailed for life? Do we need to heap hate crime charges on the list which, presumably, do little other than to pander to the social justice warrior crowd?

To recap, we are lectured that never can we question someone’s self-proclaimed gender identity. Yet, here, when it serves to push back on one of the left’s failed agendas, questioning is fair game.

More recently, there has been a mass shooting at a Virginia Walmart, reportedly by a managerial type who then shot himself.

The typical social media response to such is to decry immediately violent white males for such acts. Just one problem in that narrative, this atrocity was not committed by a white male.

Images posted on zerohedge.com, apparently from store surveillance video, clearly show a non-white person, presumably a male although one is hesitant to speak out of turn regarding this.

In watching the noon news on our local NBC affiliate – amidst the usual overabundance of stories from nearby Blair and Centre counties – there was a national report on this shooting.

Maybe it was just coincidence. More likely it was by plan that there was no mention of the shooter’s race and no images were included that might allow the viewers to make their own call on it.

Had he been the stereotypical white male mass shooter, I’m thinking any available video of the shooting, page captures from his social media postings, or any publicly available pictures would have been part of the report.

Since this violent person doesn’t fit the favored narrative, the less mentioned about race the better.

Again, why must we endure such blatant political opportunism in the midst of such tragedies?

Elon Musk was a hero to tree-hugging, oil-hating leftists when he largely was just a guy with a massive ego garnering huge government subsidies to turn out a few electric vehicles a quarter and presiding over a company whose market cap valued those EV sales at about $50,000,000 a unit.

Musk did what any other right-thinking billionaire would do with his burgeoning riches, he looked around for diversification opportunities. Along that line of thought, as long as he stuck to launching rockets, providing satellite internet service, or drilling tunnels via the humorously named The Boring Company, Musk didn’t raise the hackles of his leftist legions.

It was only after Musk made a ridiculously high offer for social media underperformer Twitter, said he wanted to restore free speech there, and ended up buying the company despite his best efforts to back out, that Musk became public enemy No. 2, right behind Donald Trump.

Because the guy welcomes attention, even of the hatred variety, Musk couldn’t help but keep hitting the Twitter fanatics where they lived. Imagine, he required that the Twitter drones work or leave.

These same self-absorbed twits, many of whom had threatened to quit if Musk took over, suddenly were clinging to their cubicles and begging to stay. They just wanted to keep censoring conservatives. Was that too much to ask?

So, Musk upped the ante, requiring those who would stay to commit to working very, very hard for their money and, by the way, no more free lunches or working from home.

As if all that was not enough. Musk took a public Twitter vote on whether or not to re-instate Donald Trump to the site’s accepted poster community.

Imagine that, a public vote, without mail-in ballots, deadline extensions, late night vote dumps, or any of the similar chicanery that has become part and parcel of our national elections. Not surprisingly, Trump was voted back onto the digital island, not that he’s in any hurry to return.

Advertisers have bought into the Woke whining about Twitter now being a free-for-all (as opposed to a predictably monolithic voice of all things leftist) and so is not fit for an advertising dollar spend.

CBS News, in a grand gesture, that lasted what one source put at 40 hours, stopped posting on Twitter due to concerns, then relented.

The investment community wonders if Musk is going to lose a lot of his, and fellow investors’ money on this Twitter adventure. The stock price of Musk’s Tesla Company has been tanking as he sells shares to fund Twitter.

But Musk always seems to be able to grab a headline and, more often than not, pull investment chestnuts out of the fire in time to turn profits.

I wouldn’t bet on him regarding Twitter. I also would not bet against him.

Either way, Musk has shaken up the landscape of social media, the megaphone for morons, and that is worth every cent he has lost so far.

The World Cup of soccer opens play Sunday, but the virtue signalling by social justice warriors has been in full song for weeks, if not months.

The venue for this World Cup is Qatar, a tiny oil-rich state in the Middle East whose desert climate has required the event to be held, uncharacteristically, in late autumn/early winter instead of its traditional summer timing.

Qatar landed the World Cup, soccer’s world championship contested every four years, the old-fashioned way, by spending copious amounts of money. And some neophytes gasp in mock horror that sports can be bought.

The reworking of the calendar has allowed broadcaster Fox to hit us with ads featuring Santa Claus hearing from a young fan who would forego Christmas presents if only the U.S. Men could claim gold.

For the uninitiated, that would be about as likely as the Cleveland Browns winning the Super Bowl, or the Pirates winning another World Series championship. Santa better get busy making presents to give to that fictional kid.

Maybe he could give him a U.S. men’s jersey, one with a patch eschewing the traditional red, white and blue stripes in favor of a rainbow array, the better to stand in solidarity with all things gay.

Qatar, you see, is intolerant on gay rights.

I know what you’re thinking. If the U.S. men felt so strongly about this issue, why not just refuse to go and play there? It’s not like they would be sacrificing anything other than the right to display yet again how weak our men are on the world soccer stage, despite the spending of copious amounts of money and the spilling of countless gallons of ink to insist otherwise.

Yes, boycotting this Qatar World Cup would be making a serious statement. Instead, we get an example of virtue signalling while ignoring the problem, or more correctly not doing anything concrete about it.

The whiners in general are outraged, claiming this might be the most absurd sporting venue since Nazi Germany hosted the 1936 Olympics.

Qatar’s purported sins are mistreatment of non-native workers, corrupt obtaining of the World Cup, and killing the climate by pumping that vile oil from its sands.

You know, oil, the lubricant of the world’s economy that climate crazies have deemed to be a poison that cannot be used because maybe its burning and/or production harms the climate. Or maybe not.

All that could be tolerated, but now Qatar has gone and done it by banning beer sales in and around the stadiums for cultural reasons.

Just as oil fuels world economies, so it is that beer fuels sports, both in terms of fan consumption and advertising support.

Maybe our U.S. Men might want to substitute uniform patches bearing beer mugs for those rainbow examples.

That would be some virtue signalling most sports fans could support.