I find this whole thing fascinating, and totally predicatable: 4 american fratboys go to a party, get drunk, call a cab and go home, need to pee, ask the cab driver to pull over - not enough urinals, so someone gets pissed off and punches something, and goes and pisses out the back, and the gas station owners "go ballistic" since they have a damaged sign, and tell the peeps that they can't leave. Before the police show up one of the "vandals" is confrontational. By my reading they all try to leave at some point, and the guards tell them to sit down (would have been shot dead in the US, and doesn't Ryan Lochte live in Florida, home of open carry and shoot at will heaven?), and someone negotiates that they pay for the damage and go home. And they get to go home, and are not shot by anyone (they would all have been dead in Florida as aliens). And this should have been the end of it.
And the US press get hold of it, and Ryan Lochte spins it as a hold up, and as an international star, his accusations need to be taken seriously and the Brazilian police are forced to investigate, come to a conclusion, prosecute, and hopefully execute these terrible people. Ryan Lochte surely knows that this is what should have happened to those thugs for violating an Olympic medal winner. And the Brazilean police leapt into action, and things started to smell foul, and they realized that Ryan Lochte had not anticipated the existence of security cams in third world countries. Silly boy. And it gets embarrassing. And someone needed to explain to him how this looked, and noone did. And he continued to dig himself into this, and discussions about white privilege. all lives matter and all that has followed. As I said at the end of the last paragraph - this should have been the end of it. Ryan Lochte may not have the brains, but his handlers have the media savvy to make this a ha-ha silly boy story, not a gotcha stupid fucking Brazilian police piece.
Noone has tried to spin the donation to the Brazilian police charity that I can see, which I find fascinating given that the vandalism was taken care of - is this to compensate for the extraction from the plane? Or why was this obvious bribe/voluntary compensation taken?
I expect to be found dead in my home in Santa Fe tomorrow morning, even though I don't live there.