More power to the stars who can cash-in on their NIL deals, but trends affecting the long-term popularity of college football are not good. The Law of Opposite Effects scores again.
I'm also very concerned by the absence of class from many in Bama's fan base. Coach Bryant is rolling over in his grave as he preached "show your class" every day of his coaching life - to players and fans.
Alabama fans used to have more class. Today, our fanbase is exemplified by all the crazy, classless rubes who show their fanny and lack of class when they call Sports Talk Radio or make posts on Internet boards.
It used to be a point of pride for me that Bama's players and fans "showed their class." It's something that made the Crimson Tide different and special ... Alas, this trait now seems to be gone with the wind.
It’s not just Bama, it’s all fanbases. Class has gone out the window in this society. It’s all about puffing your chest, and never ending Twitter beefs. If a LB makes a tackle after a 3 yd gain, or wr catches a wide open 8yd pass for a 1st down, (which used to be called doing your job) the player will jump up and celebrate like he just scored the winning td in the national championship game. As a huge FSU Seminole fan, i still enjoy watching, but it gets harder and harder every season. And like you said, college basketball is totally off my radar now. Watch woman’s softball if you want a still pretty pure college sport thats entertaining.
I know you're working on a formula that allows you to share your valuable insights and quality writing to provide for you and yours as you, we all must. I'm following your analysis of Substack and the opportunities for income it offers for my own household needs, as well, debating if I should monetize or not. I've taken a long break from writing on my own Substack, coming up with several topics, story ideas that are different from what's offered by many others.
I find myself avoiding the writings now of many Substack writers who I used to follow regularly. Specifically the ones who are all doom and gloom, black pill fatalistic types offering up a steady diet of how bad our world is. Without offering solutions, no hope. I've come to believe they are part of the PsyOps to demoralize us. While offering truthful insights about much of what is really going on around us, it becomes too much, I turn them off because of the monotony.
You have something unique to offer. You, I must get away from repackaging info others share, our own observations that merely tweak or highlight a portion of a similar overarching story. And we mustn't just write about what bothers us - I'm reminded of the Family Guy episode where Peter has a news segment "What Really Grinds My Gears." It's entertaining for awhile and then gets old and predictable. Let's not get old and predictable.
And yes, I'm under no illusions about Substack's usefulness to the powers that be in containing "rebels" in a place we can be monitored and controlled, isolated from the majority of the body politic. But here we are and we remain hopeful that something we share is valuable to those with more "reach" than us and penetrates the larger discussions, perhaps even reaching the body politic, despite the best efforts of the powerful to quarantine our ideas and notions of freedom and humanity, faith.
For as long as Substack serves us we use it. As we work on other Plan B's and C's and D's for the eventuality that Substack will no longer serve us at some point and time in the future. We live, learn and grow. We adapt. That hallmark trait of the human species that gives us our privileged place in this world (Foxes are highly adaptive, too). Adaptability. And why freedom and humanity will prevail in the end.
As you probably know from reading prior articles, I think I've identified the "solution." What needs to happen is the majority of world citizens must reach the conclusion that all important truth-seeking organizations are now completely captured. This means none of us should continue to trust our "leaders," authorities and alleged experts.
We need a Great Purge of these people. The only way that might happen is if JOURNALISTS expose all the lies and frauds. Once we definitively expose one great lie, we go onto the next one. But we have to expose that first big lie to get the necessary "truth bomb."
That's, to put it mildly, a challenge ... But the only people trying to do this are found here on Substack or a few other important alternative media sites. Thus my interest in protecting and growing the reach and influence of Substack.
Unfortunately, I do not believe journalists are capable of exposing all of the lies and frauds. At least not journalists with reach. Because, as George Orwell noted in one of his less widely read works, "a bought mind is a spoiled mind." And journalists are first writers to be spoiled by the culture and practice of totalitarianism, not even the establishment of an actual totalitarian state structure is necessary. They are the first writers to fall.
"In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth."
...
"the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers."
...
"The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. — sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues."
...
"Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books."
...
"To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all."
...
"The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news;"
...
"Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship."
...
"Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops."
...
"And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order."
...
"Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments."
...
"Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves."
...
"any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind."
...
"Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction."
Orwell was a wise fellow. It's definitely not going to be the corporate or establishment journalists who expose any frauds and crimes. That leaves it up to "citizen journalists."
That's why the Establishment doesn't want independent writers to be able to write anywhere where they can reach large numbers of citizens.
For now, at least Substack is giving some "real journalists" a chance to reach some people. This has allowed us to move the needle on public opinion a few increments on some topics. Probably enough to alarm the Status Quo Protectors.
I'd conjecture that Orwell was using futurism and zoomorphism in 1984 and Animal Farm as literary devices to convey what he saw as current events in a way to get the concepts out under the constraints of censorship that was already in place. His "hole in the corner" way. If he portrayed what he really saw as current events it couldn't have been published. Prevention of Literature speaks to that.
For the censors to allow the introduction of the concepts in 1984 and Animal Farm to the public mind implies that they believed they could control, corral the independent thinkers who began to awaken. As long as it's thought of as a dystopia set way off in the future or as animal characters the reality of it remains only a theoretical fear. "We're not there yet, but one day it might come to be." Instead of "Oh shit, we gotta rise up and stop this now." The futurism and zoomorphism blinded us from seeing what was happening in plain sight. "Maybe, one day" complacency resulted.
SciFi is often used as predictive programming, priming the public mind, it's preparative. From a panel discussion of bioethics, eugenics and the role of SciFi at the Time 100 Summit in April, 2019:
"But I think because we talk about these ideas so far in advance, the ones we think that we can protect, that we do, that the ethics can stay ahead of technology. Not just catch up, but stay ahead, so we, the, the world of science fiction writers, the Hollywood, can come up with scenarios that are well outside our technical capabilities, but are inside our abilities to have a discussion among the entire population by introducing it to millions of television or movie watchers for example, or book readers, magazine readers. That is how we start the discussion before it is technically possible." - George Church
George Church is a prominent eugenicist, a 'Jeffrey Epstein Didn't Kill Himself' BFF professor at Harvard. And a whole lot more. No doubt he's read Orwell (and Huxley) extensively.
And by ethics he means Utilitarianism, "for the greater good" coercion, lies, deception, sacrifice of the few for the many. Not the ethics that most normal people think of, Kantian, Virtue ethics, how we are to treat and respect each other as individuals. Same word. Very different meanings to the user using it.
I also agree with the Wise Fox that we need a plan B (and C and D) in case Substack isn't our great Battle Changer.
I've actually come up with one Plan B, which I'm going to throw out to the world in a coming "Message in a Bottle" Business Idea.
The executives at Substack might not like this Plan because it might steer many current Substack readers to a new Writer and Reader platform ... and save them a lot of money .... and probably allow many writers to make more money from the content they produce.
I still watch college football every Saturday, but haven't watched one college basketball game on TV for years. (I have attended a couple of Troy University basketball games in person. Those are still enjoyable for me and my kids and you can usually get a ticket for $3 if they are not being given away for free.)
I have also checked out of watching broadcast TV. I can't tolerate the commercials. I also lost all interest when the NFL played in empty stadiums and players were kneeling during the National Anthem.
Like many people, I've cut the cable TV cord .... well, kind of. I still have to get cable in the fall to watch my college football games ... So they've got me (and my money) ... at least for 4 months.
Actually, this year, my wife found some app where we could pay for college football games without paying for our regular cable - so that saved us some money. As soon as Michigan stopped Alabama in overtime in the Rose Bowl, we cancelled!
The last couple of Troy basketball games I've attended, I've noted that one of the big advertisers on the big screen TVs and banners is the Alabama Department of Public Health, which is still encouraging everyone to get their Covid vaccines and of course their flu vaccines. Everyone would include all those 19-year-old healthy basketball players who have such a high risk of dying from Covid (or the flu). And my 8-year-old son who's also at the game.
Oooops…you forced them to look in a mirror and do a little self reflection. More people should be doing that!
A few years ago, I met a grandmother walking her grandchildren home from school in my neighborhood…with masks on. I said something nicely (like it’s child abuse). She replied to me, “Well what the hell am I supposed to do?!”
One of the main jobs of a college athletic director is to raise funds to upgrade athletic facilities. This is needed to give athletes more reasons to attend your school (and then stay). So athletic directors are always soliciting wealthy donors to support the facility campaigns.
Now they are all hitting up the same boosters to increase the money the school can put into its required NIL fund and pay the players directly.
This is fine for the a tiny percentage of "student athletes," who will become wealthy two or three years earlier than they would have after they signed their pro contracts. However, this is going to leave a big budget shortfall in the facility budgets.
... Which will lead to higher ticket prices and $8 Cokes at the concession stand instead of $6, which will turn off more fans and give them more reasons to not come to the games.
Have you noticed almost all of the colleges now allow beer sales at games, when most didn't do this 15 years ago? That's an inflation work-around or an effort to boost much-needed revenue for the athletic departments. And, of course, one beer costs as much as a six-pack.
Troy University sells beers at its football and basketball games. But I've noticed the cans are not 12-ounces - They are skinnier and I think 11.2 ounces. Shrinkflation is everywhere. The beers are very expensive ... and you get less beer!
I find sports ball absolute brain dead, and moronic…unless you’re playing, or teaching your kids mental strength and competitiveness. Or, yourself! What sports has morphed into, people should be ashamed of. Pathetic!
This, coupled with the fact that athletes are more fragile than ever - the more money they make the more they sit out.
As a Red Sox fan we had Chris Sale - often unhittable, more often injured. We trade him and sign our new ace - after his third spring training appearance he’s out for the year.
All of this reminds me of the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Commercialization. So this has been going on for decades throughout society.
What did they think would be the result of shows like "My Super Sweet 16" and "Pimp My Ride"? (BTW, if you're not already aware, you can google the connection between Marxists promote materialism and envy.)
It's "going to end up causing increasingly large numbers of life-long college football fans to become disillusioned about the sport." It already has. Regular tickets were $20 when I was in college. Even 10 years after I graduated, we could get to the game 3 hrs ahead of time, park behind the engineering bldg and walk over to Ferguson for lunch and watch the early game on a big screen. Then one day, you just couldn't do that anymore. The University has more than doubled in size since I went there.
I was in school when they banned Rammer Jammer. Remember that? Boneheads get into power, want to "make their mark" and change things. I have been a die hard Bama fan most of my life through the good and bad. I eventually developed the skill of ignoring things that bother me and laughing at stupidity. I laugh a lot these days.
The bean counters run everything now. It's all about the Benjamins, Baby.
Well said, Mr. Rice! Watched my favorite Pro team a couple of years ago and I was glad they lost. The most unprofessional playing I have seen and this was a playoff game. Haven't watched again. Loved college football. Couldn't wait for bowl season. I would watch almost every game I could as the teams were pretty well matched. The best coached teams usually won. It is hard not to watch my Buckeyes but they aren't MY Buckeyes anymore. They are a semi-pro team recruited from across the nation. Since my wife doesn't care for football, it has not been as hard to give it up. It still was hard as I was born and raised in Massillon Ohio (even received a football at birth!) Stories like this remind me that I made a good decision to give it up and use that time doing other things with my family.
Jack, I've made the same observation about Alabama's roster. Once upon a time, 90 percent of the team came from the state of Alabama. Today, 90 percent of the starters are from other states. If someone grew up in a state dreaming of playing for the big state program, it probably meant more to them to be on this team.
My late father played at Alabama from 1959-1961 for Coach Bryant. Only a couple of the 35 or so players who got into games were from outside of Alabama. Most were from small towns like Troy.
100%. I haven’t watched any football in two decades. Living on a boat we don’t have a TV, but I wouldn’t have watched anyway.
I will confess to two things. My wife and I did watch the Nat Championship Game, being UM grads it seemed appropriate. And we did watch the Lions in the playoffs. I went to dozens and dozens of Lions games as a kid, and never saw a playoff game. So that seemed appropriate as well. I won’t be watching next year. Unless the Lions make the Stupid Bowl. Then I’ll watch.
Not long after the RFKJ campaign mentioned Aaron Rodgers as a possible VP contender, a friend of mine suggested Nick Saban instead. Now THAT would be an amazing choice. Are you interested, Coach Saban?
Thanks for a refreshing and interesting change of pace here, Mr. Rice.
What did Coach Saban expect from his players? Much of the higher-ed curriculum, and the athletics admissions policies and tuition breaks, encourage kids to put all their emphasis on themselves and their expected future net financial worth. And I really should not limit that comment to college students; our entire post-WW2 culture places wealth, fame, pride, esteem over the stuff that counts.
I certainly agree with the idea of broadening the scope of your newsletter Bill. Your insight and gift for communicating with the reader puts so many topics within your reach my friend. Keep up the good work.
Thanks, Jeffrey. I would be doing far more non-Covid articles already ... if I just thought a couple of the terrible Covid scandals had been exposed - and the criminals held accountable.
But this hasn't happened yet. I keep pulling for that first major "truth bomb" to detonate. If that happened, everything might change for the better.
Plus, there's plenty of huge stories on the horizon which should be of great interest to civic-minded readers. I guess I'll find out if this assumption is true or not.
That is very interesting. He's thinking many moves ahead in this chess game. I enjoyed his list of the 42 big issues his posts would explore.
About 10 years ago, I wrote a long column for The Montgomery Independent where I tried to predict where all the changes in college football would ultimately lead. That column was not saved on the Internet and I don't have a hard copy. I do think most of my predictions have started to come to pass.
One of my conclusions is that sports fans should be careful about what they wish for ... they might get it.
If I remember, here are some of my big crystal-ball predictions that DID come to pass:
1) Conference re-alignment and expansion would continue and accelerate.
2) We'd end up with a "Big Boy" conference of about 60 "blue blood" or richer schools - with the other Division I schools relegated to AAA status.
3) The playoff field would expand (from 2 to then 4 and now 12). I'm sure this will later be expanded to 16. (D-II programs have 24 teams that now make the playoffs!)
4) The bowls would becoming increasingly irrelevant as the playoffs and making the playoffs became all fans and players cared about. Most bowls would ultimately be eliminated. (This means half the teams will not end their season with a high-profile victory, which gave fans a great feeling about their program heading into the off-season).
5) The now-bigger conferences would have to add more games with conference opponents (so you could actually play other teams in your conference every 8 or so years).
6) This would make games between the Power/Big Boy Conference and the minor conferences (like the Sunbelt) far less common.
7) This would take away a huge source of revenue for the smaller schools, which depend on those "money games" to provide a big percentage of their football budgets.
8) With this revenue source much rarer, the smaller schools would face even more economic hardship than they already do ... which isn't good in a time of rampant inflation.
9) With bigger conferences and more conference games (against tough opponents) more teams would lose more games in a given year. A 9-4 record might be a good record in the future.
10) More losses by "your team" probably isn't going to make fans happier. (All prominent schools that make the playoffs - except 1 team - will now lose their final game, which will be a bummer for fans).
11) To keep the fans interested, you'd have to expand the playoffs so a 3-loss team (or a 4-loss good team) might still make the playoffs.
12) The conference championship games will probably be eliminated - as those games are just another opportunity for a loss that might kick your team out of the playoffs (or get more key players injured ... right before the playoffs).
13) Teams will continue to need more money - so the TV contracts are more important than ever - but ESPN only wants to televise games against good opponents - so that will also hurt the Troy Universities of the world.
14) Interest in football at the mid-major programs will dwindle even more as these programs will not have the chance to pull an upset against a blue blood program and won't be in the playoff conversation. This won't help athletes at these schools as their athletic directors can't put as much money into these second-class programs.
15) At some point, a fair number of previously D-I programs will give up football or go back to D-II.
Etc.
... I didn't forsee the NIL change or the unlimited transfer change - which now means we basically have an NFL model where you have unlimited free agency and direct payments to all the best players at the richest programs. The smaller, poorer schools can't compete or pay their athletes - so the best mid-Major players will continue to be pilfered by the rich programs.
Interest in the 2nd-tier programs is going to continue to decline, which is not good for the sport or the athletes who play at those programs.
Bottom-line: Overall interest in college football will decline. Only about 60 or 70 tradition-rich teams in the key remaining conferences will be considered relevant. As in college basketball and the NFL and NBA, regular season games will not be as important. Just making the playoffs will be all that matters.
But, hey, we'll have an "authentic national champion"- and the star players are no longer being "exploited." They can make $200,000 at age 19 or 20. They don't have to wait until they are 21 or 22 to make the big bucks.
He is good and a great find. The TP is good for a lot of players. I don't know why coaches even bother recruiting high school players any more. Just recruit the gems from other colleges who might want to transfer.
That's already starting to happen. That's going to end up keeping high school players from getting a shot. Some that would have gotten D-I scholarships in past will have to start at Division I-AA or Division II programs.
Bill, great story! While I enjoy your Covid articles, I enjoy articles like this one, too. I learned a few things I didn’t know before about college sports, so thank you for that.
I’m not much of a sports fan anymore. I once was a rabid LA Lakers fan, but once Kobe retired and the whole NBA went woke, I stopped watching cold turkey. Once in a while I’ll watch a game with my brother, but I don’t even know most of the players, so I’m not too interested.
I'm also very concerned by the absence of class from many in Bama's fan base. Coach Bryant is rolling over in his grave as he preached "show your class" every day of his coaching life - to players and fans.
Alabama fans used to have more class. Today, our fanbase is exemplified by all the crazy, classless rubes who show their fanny and lack of class when they call Sports Talk Radio or make posts on Internet boards.
It used to be a point of pride for me that Bama's players and fans "showed their class." It's something that made the Crimson Tide different and special ... Alas, this trait now seems to be gone with the wind.
All of that ended with Harvey Updyke.
Most of the fans I'm talking about never took one class at the University of Alabama - Updyke definitely included.
It’s not just Bama, it’s all fanbases. Class has gone out the window in this society. It’s all about puffing your chest, and never ending Twitter beefs. If a LB makes a tackle after a 3 yd gain, or wr catches a wide open 8yd pass for a 1st down, (which used to be called doing your job) the player will jump up and celebrate like he just scored the winning td in the national championship game. As a huge FSU Seminole fan, i still enjoy watching, but it gets harder and harder every season. And like you said, college basketball is totally off my radar now. Watch woman’s softball if you want a still pretty pure college sport thats entertaining.
I know you're working on a formula that allows you to share your valuable insights and quality writing to provide for you and yours as you, we all must. I'm following your analysis of Substack and the opportunities for income it offers for my own household needs, as well, debating if I should monetize or not. I've taken a long break from writing on my own Substack, coming up with several topics, story ideas that are different from what's offered by many others.
I find myself avoiding the writings now of many Substack writers who I used to follow regularly. Specifically the ones who are all doom and gloom, black pill fatalistic types offering up a steady diet of how bad our world is. Without offering solutions, no hope. I've come to believe they are part of the PsyOps to demoralize us. While offering truthful insights about much of what is really going on around us, it becomes too much, I turn them off because of the monotony.
You have something unique to offer. You, I must get away from repackaging info others share, our own observations that merely tweak or highlight a portion of a similar overarching story. And we mustn't just write about what bothers us - I'm reminded of the Family Guy episode where Peter has a news segment "What Really Grinds My Gears." It's entertaining for awhile and then gets old and predictable. Let's not get old and predictable.
https://i.imgflip.com/1u0j9a.jpg
And yes, I'm under no illusions about Substack's usefulness to the powers that be in containing "rebels" in a place we can be monitored and controlled, isolated from the majority of the body politic. But here we are and we remain hopeful that something we share is valuable to those with more "reach" than us and penetrates the larger discussions, perhaps even reaching the body politic, despite the best efforts of the powerful to quarantine our ideas and notions of freedom and humanity, faith.
For as long as Substack serves us we use it. As we work on other Plan B's and C's and D's for the eventuality that Substack will no longer serve us at some point and time in the future. We live, learn and grow. We adapt. That hallmark trait of the human species that gives us our privileged place in this world (Foxes are highly adaptive, too). Adaptability. And why freedom and humanity will prevail in the end.
That's great stuff, Freedom Fox. Thank you.
As you probably know from reading prior articles, I think I've identified the "solution." What needs to happen is the majority of world citizens must reach the conclusion that all important truth-seeking organizations are now completely captured. This means none of us should continue to trust our "leaders," authorities and alleged experts.
We need a Great Purge of these people. The only way that might happen is if JOURNALISTS expose all the lies and frauds. Once we definitively expose one great lie, we go onto the next one. But we have to expose that first big lie to get the necessary "truth bomb."
That's, to put it mildly, a challenge ... But the only people trying to do this are found here on Substack or a few other important alternative media sites. Thus my interest in protecting and growing the reach and influence of Substack.
Unfortunately, I do not believe journalists are capable of exposing all of the lies and frauds. At least not journalists with reach. Because, as George Orwell noted in one of his less widely read works, "a bought mind is a spoiled mind." And journalists are first writers to be spoiled by the culture and practice of totalitarianism, not even the establishment of an actual totalitarian state structure is necessary. They are the first writers to fall.
The Prevention of Literature
George Orwell, Polemic, 1946
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-prevention-of-literature/
(selected excerpts in comment below)
"In our age, the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork, the encroachment of official bodies like the M.O.I. and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions, and the continuous war atmosphere of the past ten years, whose distorting effects no one has been able to escape. Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth."
...
"the controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at bottom a controversy of the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies. What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers."
...
"The fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine, the Spanish civil war, Russian policy in Poland, and so forth, is not due entirely to conscious dishonesty, but any writer or journalist who is fully sympathetic for the U.S.S.R. — sympathetic, that is, in the way the Russians themselves would want him to be — does have to acquiesce in deliberate falsification on important issues."
...
"Forgeries almost as gross as this have been committed in recent years. But the significant thing is not that they happen, but that, even when they are known about, they provoke no reaction from the left-wing intelligentsia as a whole. The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect of the lies which they condone getting out of the newspapers and into the history books."
...
"To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all."
...
"The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news;"
...
"Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship."
...
"Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country. The mere prevalence of certain ideas can spread a kind of poison that makes one subject after another impossible for literary purposes. Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops."
...
"And the destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order."
...
"Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government departments."
...
"Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves."
...
"any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against ‘individualism’ and the ‘ivory tower’, no pious platitudes to the effect that ‘true individuality is only attained through identification with the community’, can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind."
...
"Any writer or journalist who denies that fact — and nearly all the current praise of the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial — is, in effect, demanding his own destruction."
Orwell was a wise fellow. It's definitely not going to be the corporate or establishment journalists who expose any frauds and crimes. That leaves it up to "citizen journalists."
That's why the Establishment doesn't want independent writers to be able to write anywhere where they can reach large numbers of citizens.
For now, at least Substack is giving some "real journalists" a chance to reach some people. This has allowed us to move the needle on public opinion a few increments on some topics. Probably enough to alarm the Status Quo Protectors.
It's why we're both here!
I'd conjecture that Orwell was using futurism and zoomorphism in 1984 and Animal Farm as literary devices to convey what he saw as current events in a way to get the concepts out under the constraints of censorship that was already in place. His "hole in the corner" way. If he portrayed what he really saw as current events it couldn't have been published. Prevention of Literature speaks to that.
For the censors to allow the introduction of the concepts in 1984 and Animal Farm to the public mind implies that they believed they could control, corral the independent thinkers who began to awaken. As long as it's thought of as a dystopia set way off in the future or as animal characters the reality of it remains only a theoretical fear. "We're not there yet, but one day it might come to be." Instead of "Oh shit, we gotta rise up and stop this now." The futurism and zoomorphism blinded us from seeing what was happening in plain sight. "Maybe, one day" complacency resulted.
I bet you are absolutely right. I've never thought about that.
As many of us now know, 1984 and Animal Farm served as an instruction manual for the people and organizations who really matter.
SciFi is often used as predictive programming, priming the public mind, it's preparative. From a panel discussion of bioethics, eugenics and the role of SciFi at the Time 100 Summit in April, 2019:
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/dr-george-church-dr-giuliana-214036340.html
"But I think because we talk about these ideas so far in advance, the ones we think that we can protect, that we do, that the ethics can stay ahead of technology. Not just catch up, but stay ahead, so we, the, the world of science fiction writers, the Hollywood, can come up with scenarios that are well outside our technical capabilities, but are inside our abilities to have a discussion among the entire population by introducing it to millions of television or movie watchers for example, or book readers, magazine readers. That is how we start the discussion before it is technically possible." - George Church
George Church is a prominent eugenicist, a 'Jeffrey Epstein Didn't Kill Himself' BFF professor at Harvard. And a whole lot more. No doubt he's read Orwell (and Huxley) extensively.
And by ethics he means Utilitarianism, "for the greater good" coercion, lies, deception, sacrifice of the few for the many. Not the ethics that most normal people think of, Kantian, Virtue ethics, how we are to treat and respect each other as individuals. Same word. Very different meanings to the user using it.
I also agree with the Wise Fox that we need a plan B (and C and D) in case Substack isn't our great Battle Changer.
I've actually come up with one Plan B, which I'm going to throw out to the world in a coming "Message in a Bottle" Business Idea.
The executives at Substack might not like this Plan because it might steer many current Substack readers to a new Writer and Reader platform ... and save them a lot of money .... and probably allow many writers to make more money from the content they produce.
..... This is called an "article tease."
I will go wherever writers are challenging the powers-that-be and the status quo.
I love this. Me too, Brian. Everything is a "work-around" to try to get around the captured "gatekeepers of the news."
I don't watch any college football or professional football anymore and it has freed up a whole bunch of my time.
I still watch college football every Saturday, but haven't watched one college basketball game on TV for years. (I have attended a couple of Troy University basketball games in person. Those are still enjoyable for me and my kids and you can usually get a ticket for $3 if they are not being given away for free.)
I have also checked out of watching broadcast TV. I can't tolerate the commercials. I also lost all interest when the NFL played in empty stadiums and players were kneeling during the National Anthem.
Like many people, I've cut the cable TV cord .... well, kind of. I still have to get cable in the fall to watch my college football games ... So they've got me (and my money) ... at least for 4 months.
Actually, this year, my wife found some app where we could pay for college football games without paying for our regular cable - so that saved us some money. As soon as Michigan stopped Alabama in overtime in the Rose Bowl, we cancelled!
“Brought to you by Pfizer!”
Seriously? So “they” want to murder you and entertain you as well.🦭🦭🦭🦭🐑🐑🐑🐑
The last couple of Troy basketball games I've attended, I've noted that one of the big advertisers on the big screen TVs and banners is the Alabama Department of Public Health, which is still encouraging everyone to get their Covid vaccines and of course their flu vaccines. Everyone would include all those 19-year-old healthy basketball players who have such a high risk of dying from Covid (or the flu). And my 8-year-old son who's also at the game.
Pure, unadulterated INSANITY Bill! Where the hell are the adults????
They’re probably cowering and afraid to speak out…wouldn’t want to miss the “gladiator match”.
Every single parent should be standing up against this bullshit!
Renee, I once wrote a column with the headline, "What happened to the adults in the room?"
It got a lot of reads ... but very few new subscribers. (Ha!)
Oooops…you forced them to look in a mirror and do a little self reflection. More people should be doing that!
A few years ago, I met a grandmother walking her grandchildren home from school in my neighborhood…with masks on. I said something nicely (like it’s child abuse). She replied to me, “Well what the hell am I supposed to do?!”
I kid you not!
"Ma'am, don't live your life in fear. That's what our rulers want."
Unintended Consequences will kick in as well ...
One of the main jobs of a college athletic director is to raise funds to upgrade athletic facilities. This is needed to give athletes more reasons to attend your school (and then stay). So athletic directors are always soliciting wealthy donors to support the facility campaigns.
Now they are all hitting up the same boosters to increase the money the school can put into its required NIL fund and pay the players directly.
This is fine for the a tiny percentage of "student athletes," who will become wealthy two or three years earlier than they would have after they signed their pro contracts. However, this is going to leave a big budget shortfall in the facility budgets.
... Which will lead to higher ticket prices and $8 Cokes at the concession stand instead of $6, which will turn off more fans and give them more reasons to not come to the games.
Not to mention the $20 beers…
Have you noticed almost all of the colleges now allow beer sales at games, when most didn't do this 15 years ago? That's an inflation work-around or an effort to boost much-needed revenue for the athletic departments. And, of course, one beer costs as much as a six-pack.
Troy University sells beers at its football and basketball games. But I've noticed the cans are not 12-ounces - They are skinnier and I think 11.2 ounces. Shrinkflation is everywhere. The beers are very expensive ... and you get less beer!
I find sports ball absolute brain dead, and moronic…unless you’re playing, or teaching your kids mental strength and competitiveness. Or, yourself! What sports has morphed into, people should be ashamed of. Pathetic!
“Absolutely”…no edit.
This, coupled with the fact that athletes are more fragile than ever - the more money they make the more they sit out.
As a Red Sox fan we had Chris Sale - often unhittable, more often injured. We trade him and sign our new ace - after his third spring training appearance he’s out for the year.
All of this reminds me of the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Commercialization. So this has been going on for decades throughout society.
What did they think would be the result of shows like "My Super Sweet 16" and "Pimp My Ride"? (BTW, if you're not already aware, you can google the connection between Marxists promote materialism and envy.)
It's "going to end up causing increasingly large numbers of life-long college football fans to become disillusioned about the sport." It already has. Regular tickets were $20 when I was in college. Even 10 years after I graduated, we could get to the game 3 hrs ahead of time, park behind the engineering bldg and walk over to Ferguson for lunch and watch the early game on a big screen. Then one day, you just couldn't do that anymore. The University has more than doubled in size since I went there.
I was in school when they banned Rammer Jammer. Remember that? Boneheads get into power, want to "make their mark" and change things. I have been a die hard Bama fan most of my life through the good and bad. I eventually developed the skill of ignoring things that bother me and laughing at stupidity. I laugh a lot these days.
The bean counters run everything now. It's all about the Benjamins, Baby.
I also remember when they banned "Rammer Jammer." That was an early sign that Wokeness was taking over.
Well said, Mr. Rice! Watched my favorite Pro team a couple of years ago and I was glad they lost. The most unprofessional playing I have seen and this was a playoff game. Haven't watched again. Loved college football. Couldn't wait for bowl season. I would watch almost every game I could as the teams were pretty well matched. The best coached teams usually won. It is hard not to watch my Buckeyes but they aren't MY Buckeyes anymore. They are a semi-pro team recruited from across the nation. Since my wife doesn't care for football, it has not been as hard to give it up. It still was hard as I was born and raised in Massillon Ohio (even received a football at birth!) Stories like this remind me that I made a good decision to give it up and use that time doing other things with my family.
Jack, I've made the same observation about Alabama's roster. Once upon a time, 90 percent of the team came from the state of Alabama. Today, 90 percent of the starters are from other states. If someone grew up in a state dreaming of playing for the big state program, it probably meant more to them to be on this team.
My late father played at Alabama from 1959-1961 for Coach Bryant. Only a couple of the 35 or so players who got into games were from outside of Alabama. Most were from small towns like Troy.
100%. I haven’t watched any football in two decades. Living on a boat we don’t have a TV, but I wouldn’t have watched anyway.
I will confess to two things. My wife and I did watch the Nat Championship Game, being UM grads it seemed appropriate. And we did watch the Lions in the playoffs. I went to dozens and dozens of Lions games as a kid, and never saw a playoff game. So that seemed appropriate as well. I won’t be watching next year. Unless the Lions make the Stupid Bowl. Then I’ll watch.
Enjoyed this column.
Not long after the RFKJ campaign mentioned Aaron Rodgers as a possible VP contender, a friend of mine suggested Nick Saban instead. Now THAT would be an amazing choice. Are you interested, Coach Saban?
Thanks for a refreshing and interesting change of pace here, Mr. Rice.
What did Coach Saban expect from his players? Much of the higher-ed curriculum, and the athletics admissions policies and tuition breaks, encourage kids to put all their emphasis on themselves and their expected future net financial worth. And I really should not limit that comment to college students; our entire post-WW2 culture places wealth, fame, pride, esteem over the stuff that counts.
I certainly agree with the idea of broadening the scope of your newsletter Bill. Your insight and gift for communicating with the reader puts so many topics within your reach my friend. Keep up the good work.
Thanks, Jeffrey. I would be doing far more non-Covid articles already ... if I just thought a couple of the terrible Covid scandals had been exposed - and the criminals held accountable.
But this hasn't happened yet. I keep pulling for that first major "truth bomb" to detonate. If that happened, everything might change for the better.
Plus, there's plenty of huge stories on the horizon which should be of great interest to civic-minded readers. I guess I'll find out if this assumption is true or not.
Division 3 football, still “for the love of the game”.
Best analysis of CFB from the future trends is at.
https://x.com/genetics56?s=21&t=PpFpNXu9rf_rm7Yy_79l6g
He is incredibly plugged in to the future and player-employees.
That is very interesting. He's thinking many moves ahead in this chess game. I enjoyed his list of the 42 big issues his posts would explore.
About 10 years ago, I wrote a long column for The Montgomery Independent where I tried to predict where all the changes in college football would ultimately lead. That column was not saved on the Internet and I don't have a hard copy. I do think most of my predictions have started to come to pass.
One of my conclusions is that sports fans should be careful about what they wish for ... they might get it.
If I remember, here are some of my big crystal-ball predictions that DID come to pass:
1) Conference re-alignment and expansion would continue and accelerate.
2) We'd end up with a "Big Boy" conference of about 60 "blue blood" or richer schools - with the other Division I schools relegated to AAA status.
3) The playoff field would expand (from 2 to then 4 and now 12). I'm sure this will later be expanded to 16. (D-II programs have 24 teams that now make the playoffs!)
4) The bowls would becoming increasingly irrelevant as the playoffs and making the playoffs became all fans and players cared about. Most bowls would ultimately be eliminated. (This means half the teams will not end their season with a high-profile victory, which gave fans a great feeling about their program heading into the off-season).
5) The now-bigger conferences would have to add more games with conference opponents (so you could actually play other teams in your conference every 8 or so years).
6) This would make games between the Power/Big Boy Conference and the minor conferences (like the Sunbelt) far less common.
7) This would take away a huge source of revenue for the smaller schools, which depend on those "money games" to provide a big percentage of their football budgets.
8) With this revenue source much rarer, the smaller schools would face even more economic hardship than they already do ... which isn't good in a time of rampant inflation.
9) With bigger conferences and more conference games (against tough opponents) more teams would lose more games in a given year. A 9-4 record might be a good record in the future.
10) More losses by "your team" probably isn't going to make fans happier. (All prominent schools that make the playoffs - except 1 team - will now lose their final game, which will be a bummer for fans).
11) To keep the fans interested, you'd have to expand the playoffs so a 3-loss team (or a 4-loss good team) might still make the playoffs.
12) The conference championship games will probably be eliminated - as those games are just another opportunity for a loss that might kick your team out of the playoffs (or get more key players injured ... right before the playoffs).
13) Teams will continue to need more money - so the TV contracts are more important than ever - but ESPN only wants to televise games against good opponents - so that will also hurt the Troy Universities of the world.
14) Interest in football at the mid-major programs will dwindle even more as these programs will not have the chance to pull an upset against a blue blood program and won't be in the playoff conversation. This won't help athletes at these schools as their athletic directors can't put as much money into these second-class programs.
15) At some point, a fair number of previously D-I programs will give up football or go back to D-II.
Etc.
... I didn't forsee the NIL change or the unlimited transfer change - which now means we basically have an NFL model where you have unlimited free agency and direct payments to all the best players at the richest programs. The smaller, poorer schools can't compete or pay their athletes - so the best mid-Major players will continue to be pilfered by the rich programs.
Interest in the 2nd-tier programs is going to continue to decline, which is not good for the sport or the athletes who play at those programs.
Bottom-line: Overall interest in college football will decline. Only about 60 or 70 tradition-rich teams in the key remaining conferences will be considered relevant. As in college basketball and the NFL and NBA, regular season games will not be as important. Just making the playoffs will be all that matters.
But, hey, we'll have an "authentic national champion"- and the star players are no longer being "exploited." They can make $200,000 at age 19 or 20. They don't have to wait until they are 21 or 22 to make the big bucks.
Transfer portal was good for this player:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D8uBN3_pmw
He is good and a great find. The TP is good for a lot of players. I don't know why coaches even bother recruiting high school players any more. Just recruit the gems from other colleges who might want to transfer.
That's already starting to happen. That's going to end up keeping high school players from getting a shot. Some that would have gotten D-I scholarships in past will have to start at Division I-AA or Division II programs.
Bill, great story! While I enjoy your Covid articles, I enjoy articles like this one, too. I learned a few things I didn’t know before about college sports, so thank you for that.
I’m not much of a sports fan anymore. I once was a rabid LA Lakers fan, but once Kobe retired and the whole NBA went woke, I stopped watching cold turkey. Once in a while I’ll watch a game with my brother, but I don’t even know most of the players, so I’m not too interested.