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Our destructive obsession with sports


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#11 stocks

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Posted 22 August 2016 - 10:47 AM

India wins the Olympics

 

India does nothing whatever to encourage its citizens to devote their lives to trying to jump a quarter of a centimeter longer or higher than anyone else in human history.

 

This is the kind of goal that totalitarian regimes set for their citizens (or perhaps they should be called prisoners).

 

The great book Russia in 1839, showed that tyrannies demand immense efforts of their populations to bring forth trifles, and there can be no trifle more trifling than an Olympic record.
 

If I had been a poor Brazilian in the favelas of São Paulo who had to struggle to and from work for two hours every day because of bad roads and insufficient public transport, and who had witnessed the expenditure of billions on infrastructure that was so soon to crumble to worthlessness and liability, all for the sake of a couple weeks’ gormless global entertainment, I should have been furious and ready for revolt

 

 http://takimag.com/a...t#ixzz4I4hTIFIn

 

 


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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#12 stocks

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Posted 23 August 2016 - 04:17 AM

The Rottenness of the Olympics

 

The whole thing seems just joyless. An evil mix of external activity which looks colorful and fun- and a disturbing kind of inner emptiness. The human body deployed with great focus and efficiency, toward an empty end. A self-glorification that is at the same time very debasing to human nature.

 

Leni Riefenstahl set the style of all subsequent Olympics with her 1936 film, Olympia: The apotheosis of athleticism combined with neo-pagan spiritualized materialism. What recent events have added is a heavy emphasis on multi-culturalism and a creepy obsession with sex

 

It is an utter distortion of the traditional values of a country, rebranding it as a brave new world of multicultural diversity with any depth or true patriotic feeling completely expunged. 

 

Don't the Olympics now represent the excessive pursuit of physical as opposed to moral excellence and the deforming of nature by the absurd amount of training undertaken by the athletes in their lust for victory. The spirit of amateurism is well and truly dead. 

 

 

 

http://charltonteach...portant-to.html

 

 

 

 

 

 


-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#13 stocks

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Posted 30 August 2016 - 11:13 AM

 Awesome  NFL mom determined to stop her son’s finances from being sacked

 

The basic issue is you have people with first-generation wealth. You don’t have the knowledge and that’s what’s so frightening and leaves you so vulnerable to being taken advantage of.

 

You don’t understand taxation or the selection process for agents and financial advisers at the beginning of the process. It sounds good and you’d like to trust everybody, but the fact is you can’t. And they know that you don’t know. It’s like a shark in the water. We’ve changed agents three times. We’ve changed financial advisers four times

 

If I believe the numbers, 50% or 60% of the guys go broke 5 or 10 years after retirement. But 99.9% of them have financial advisers. What’s going wrong? When people hear about someone going broke, they think: “They needed a good adviser.” But they had one.

 

There’s two things that they have: an agent and a financial adviser. The presenter said “financial advisers are in a competitive industry.” And like an agent, they’re afraid to give players a hard no because they fear losing the client.

 

Rarely will you find someone strong enough in their philosophies and their ethics to say: “I’m gonna give it to you raw. Consequences be damned.” When they see players overspending, they don’t say anything. But that’s their job.

 

 

 

 

http://www.marketwat...&dist=bigcharts

 

 

 

 

 


-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#14 stocks

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Posted 08 September 2016 - 07:02 PM

Colin Kaepernick vs. John Rocker: Some Speech Is More Free Than Other Speech

 

2016

 

President Obama said Monday that Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, is “exercising his constitutional right” by refusing to stand during the national anthem

 

2000

 

Baseball has ordered John Rocker, the Atlanta Braves pitcher, to undergo psychological testing for the disparaging remarks that he made about gays and minority-group members in a magazine article last month.

 

Commissioner Bud Selig suspended the Atlanta Braves’ No. 1 relief pitcher for 73 days, marking the first time a baseball player has been disciplined for speech. …

 

 

http://www.unz.com/i...n-other-speech/

 

 

 


Edited by stocks, 08 September 2016 - 07:04 PM.

-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#15 stocks

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Posted 11 September 2016 - 07:29 AM

Colin Kaepernick vs. John Rocker: Some Speech Is More Free Than Other Speech

 

2016

 

President Obama said Monday that Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, is “exercising his constitutional right” by refusing to stand during the national anthem

 

2000

 

Commissioner Bud Selig suspended the Atlanta Braves’ No. 1 relief pitcher for 73 days, marking the first time a baseball player has been disciplined for speech. …

 

The NFL has officially banned Tennessee Titans linebacker Avery Williamson from wearing cleats custom made as a memorial to the victims and first responders who fell in the line of duty during that terrible day on 9/11.

 

Last month the NFL refused to allow the Dallas Cowboys to wear decals on their helmets showing support for the Dallas Police Department, which lost five officers in one terrible attack in July.

 

 

http://www.breitbart...ws-to-pay-fine/


-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#16 stocks

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Posted 07 October 2016 - 06:50 PM

The team's "fixer" gets paid by the Cowboys to make drunk driving and domestic violence arrests of Cowboy football players disappear before they get into the newspapers.

 

“A tremendous asset to the franchise,” Jerry Jones said. “. . . I won’t get into detail of the kinds of things [Wells does], because he does everything.” …

Said longtime attorney Anthony Lyons: “There are going to be times that David comes up with a result that you’re just not going to ask him about.” …

The Cowboys are worth $4.2 billion, a value that in part depends on the team’s ability to keep star players on the field, contend for championships and maintain its global popularity. For every incident that generates a negative headline, 10 are handled without the public’s knowledge.

 

http://www.unz.com/i...am-out-of-jail/

 

 

-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#17 stocks

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Posted 24 October 2016 - 09:13 AM

"Peak NFL" occurred in 2015

 

It could be that some fans abandoned the games as the p.c. virus slowly infected the NFL. (One also suspects that plenty of people quit watching the Academy Awards because they couldn't stand listening to political speeches that pegged the needle in both sanctimony and stupidity.)

 

But in the end, the problem has much less to do with politics than with the games themselves.

 

The NFL and the networks have crafted a way to squeeze the maximum number of ads into the broadcast of a single game, causing viewers to lose interest even as they watch. According to some studies, the average football game, during which the clock runs for precisely 60 minutes, consists of a mere 11 minutes of action

 

http://www.weeklysta...article/2005033

 

 

 


Edited by stocks, 24 October 2016 - 09:15 AM.

-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#18 stocks

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Posted 31 October 2016 - 02:29 PM

"Peak NFL" occurred in 2015

 

 

ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in the last month, and ESPN’s Monday Night Football fell by 24%.

 

The subscriber loss represents the worst in ESPN history, made all the worse since ESPN has essentially lost 300,000 subscribers a month over the past few years anyway. 

 

Though ESPN loves their social justice warriors Bomani Jones, Pablo S. Torre, and others, those panel shows don’t move the freight for the network. True sports programming does. Therefore, ESPN might react by scaling back on the radically leftists panel shows Around the HornHis & Hers, and others.

 

 

 

http://www.breitbart...ant-understand/


-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#19 stocks

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Posted 09 January 2017 - 12:02 PM

Elite college football programs have become giant entertainment businesses that happen to do a little education on the side.

 

Numerous students are so stupid that they would not be able to stay eligible without the constant tutoring done strictly for the athletes. One college has a multimillion dollar classroom building, with incredible amenities strictly for tutoring of athletes.

 

 

Over the past decade college football has not only doubled in size, but its elite programs have become a $2.5-billion-a-year entertainment business, with lavishly paid coaches, lucrative television deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. Thanks to the support of their football-mad representatives in Congress, teams aren’t required to pay taxes. In most cases, those windfalls are not passed on to the universities themselves, but flow directly back into their athletic departments.

 

College presidents have been unwilling or powerless to stop a system that has spawned a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, and a growing cadre of bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. From the University of Oregon’s lavish $42 million academic center for athletes to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s $7 million paycheck—ten times what the school pays its president, and 70 times what a full-time professor there earns.

 

 

 

https://www.amazon.c...ion dollar ball

 


-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#20 stocks

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Posted 14 January 2017 - 11:02 AM

Bo Jackson, one of the most talented athletes to ever walk the earth, says the only reason he played football was a general ignorance of what it does to people.

 

“If I knew back then what I know now,” Jackson tells USA TODAY Sports, “I would have never played football. Never. I wish I had known about all of those head injuries, but no one knew that. And the people that did know that, they wouldn’t tell anybody.

 

“The game has gotten so violent, so rough. We’re so much more educated on this CTE stuff, there’s no way I would ever allow my kids to play football today.

 

 

http://deadspin.com/...he-h-1791157695

 

 

 


-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.