While the term has been around Wall Street (its short for talking up your positions, or investments) since The Flood, it applies in all things, everywhere:
Law Enforcement wants stricter laws and longer sentences, as do defense attorneys (people will fork over big money when faced with multi decades s prison stints). Surgeons want to cut. Stockbrokers are always bullish, unless they can make money by selling fear. School teachers blame parents; parents blame school teachers. Al Queda is lurking! No, now its Iran! 401k's will provide enough savings to fund a long and unproductive old age. Football is just good clean fun. The Military wants to provide you with an education! You can trust your kids with the clergy...
OMG....
And people believe this sh#!
I knew Dave Duerson. Dave Duerson was an acquaintance of mine. Commissioner Roger Goodell, you're no Dave Duerson. (Actually, I met Duerson perhaps a handful of times... he was barely an acquaintance... but he was a nice enough guy.)
If you have been reading my stuff for awhile you know I have a couple of pet peeves - politicos willing to destroy a lifetime of work and savings, vainglorious military leaders and politicians willing to kill innocents and get our kids killed, and brain and spine injury from youth sports... no doubt from my own close call playing football (I've also done a fair amount of boxing in my youth and submission grappling all my life... and if I had to do it over, I would have played tennis and golf).
The NFL and NCAA football are just other organizations that internalize their profits while externalizing their costs. The NFL has an absolutely free farm system with absolutely no liability in NCAA College Football, and the NCAA has the same deal with high school across the country. We have known for years that football players die much younger than the rest of the population and that they were not very successful in their lives after football. That lack of success was blamed on an inability to adjust to life after the game... yet this does not seem to be the case for baseball players...
We have known since the 1920's that 25 to 50% of long term boxers go daft - even used boxing in the scientific diagnosis: "dementia pugilistica" (I used to caddy at Knollwood Country Club in Greenberg, NY, and had the pleasure of caddying for Gerry Quarry in the mid to late 1970's a couple of times. As I look back on it, I am convinced he was suffering badly from some level of dementia at that time - couldn't remember his score, confused when selecting a club... the guys he was with were too busy kissing his a$$ to notice something wasn't right, but a teenage caddy did... its a funny old world...).... but they might have to change the name to "dementia gridironica".
Football will not survive the research and findings of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy ("CTE"). But it won't go down without a fight. NFL teams worth $500 million and college coaches making several $million per year and living like royalty are not going to let drooling former players that look like extras from "Shawn of the Dead" ruin their gig. This goes for despotic rulers in MENA, Democrat and Republicans here in the U.S., and anybody else whose interests are tied to the status quo in energy.
Some of the things you do when you are young cost you dearly when you are older... who you had sex with, the money you did not save by spending it on sh#! you didn't need, the sports you played, the debt you took on to pay for college... (this phenomenon applies to Industrial Society as well) Then there are the things you believed: 401k savings will be enough, stretch for a house cause housing prices always go up, saving the planet by not having children, the pronouncements from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, OPEC, the U.S. administration... that things will always be the way they have been.
Well, there's not a shred of truth coming out of any of them.
Only you can think for yourself.
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