180 thoughts on “Tragedy Of Managerialism”

1. Pingback: N.S. Lyons On The Shape & Trajectory Of The Expertocracy – William M. Briggs

2. “ Generational politics is a way to condition the young to conform to the cultural norms.” Or not. As seen in gen x.

3. Garrett Hardin was the one who wrote about the tragedy of the commons in the modern era. He’s a very underrated writer who was popular in our circles in the late 70s and early 80s but seems to have been forgotten now. HIs book Filters Against Folly was a important influence on my thinking and is an excellent primer on how to integrate ecological thinking (not the “climate change” drivel that has displaced real ecology) into a coherent worldview.

4. So, managerialism is bad. What’s the alternative?

   Put yourself into Z Man’s story where you own a factory that has become too big for you to manage and you must hire help. You want to grow, but you don’t want to plant the seeds of managerialism. What do you do instead?

   I’ll conclude with some irrelevant thoughts:

   I find myself drawn to the idea that maybe prohibiting growth beyond a certain size is the solution. There is no agribusiness, for example, because only family farms are allowed. There is no big finance because the stock market is banned except for maybe futures to help producers like farmers with uncertain weather and crop yields. There is no usury because there is only one national bank that charges a much more modest fee for a loan.

   Of course, this solution would result in a lot more economic inefficiency, higher prices, and a materially lower standard of living. It might still result in a better life.

   • Z Man at the 56 minute mark:

     “This is fundamentally why our society is so dysfunctional. There’s no one responsible for anything. No one can be held accountable in a system where everybody is accountable because no one is accountable under that kind of system.

     I’ve often joked that our economy is a pirate’s cove. People come into the American economy and they want to steal as much as they can steal, and do as little as necessary in order to make as much profit. And the reason for that is that all the businesses that are profiting off the American economy and chewing up our social capital and turning it into cash, they don’t have an interest, they are just hired men.”

     Prudence says that when we correct a problem in a complex system, that we prefer to make as few changes as necessary. What’s the most elegant solution to this problem?

     The insistence of clear lines of responsibility and authority reminds me of one of the reasons that a failed painter rejected representative government.

5. Not completely off-topic as this insanity results from the kind of managerialism Z discusses:

   VIDEO: Cruise cars halt traffic in SF, cite ‘connectivity issues’ linked to Outside Lands festival

   https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/video-cruise-cars-halt-traffic-in-sf-cite-connectivity-issues-linked-to-outside-lands-festival/

   San Francisco has enormous problems and these doofuses running the city are allowing this dyfunctional technology to run (or not run) rampant and cause a big mess. And during the weekend where there is a massive music festival happening in Golden Gate Park

6. Managerialism sounded like a good answer, but the more I reflect on it, it’s too pat.

   Granted, if your business model is moving electrons around through spreadsheets, and using computer algorithms to do equities trades, you are ripe for grifters. Once they get all the easily extractable value of your company, they are off to the next mark. Good luck picking up the pieces, and hope you learned your lesson.

   But if there is a market for grifters, there is also a market for anti-grifters. If the owner selects the right teams (which would logically have a track record, and maybe even a form of associational certification), he wins and gets whatever is left of the rubble from the owners who chose poorly, at fire-sale prices.

   Manufacturing is another thing entirely. The huge amounts of capital equipment are not easily looted. That’s why the raiders of the 70s and 80s had to go for the low hanging fruit — pension funds and cash-heavy balance sheets. To some extent, capital is still lootable through asset-based lending and collateralization practices, but now your grifters not only need to con you, they also need to con the green eye shades at the bank, and the deeper you loot, the more eye shades you have to fool. Ultimately, all of them have to be brought in on it. If there’s one who flips to the regulators, it’s game over. And you know the feds are always on the lookout for someone flippable.

   College football is, of course, more like the first type. There’s no capital equipment to speak of; your entire balance sheet is who is on your team at the moment, and your prospects of getting future talent, The particular school is of little import. They are like the pro leagues in that respect. Oakland Raiders, Brooklyn Dodgers, Cleveland Rams, New York Giants, etc.

   Burnham thought when he wrote it (1940?) that USSR was the current pinnacle of managerialism, but that mantle would soon be worn by Nazi Germany soon after the defeat of England. The US might someday grow it’s primitive managerialism of the New Deal into the Real Deal, and take over from Germany, but the American character made the quasi-slavery of managerialism unlikely.

   It’s tempting to see tentacles of managerialism everywhere you look, but if you list the symptoms you see which support that hypothesis against those which do not, not only is it not as clear, I think its unlikely that is the explanation.

7. Is it any surprise our society is being destroyed by managerialism? How many MBA’s have been issued in the past four decades? I mean how did those early titans of industry in the early 20th century “manage” pun intended to make their fortunes without the all mighty MBA?

   My guess is because most were free thinking pragmatists who could think outside the box and improvise to solve problems. This is the opposite of managerialism. If Henry Ford and Thomas Edison had to deal with MBA’s I’m betting they not only would have fired them, but punched them in the face on their way out the door.

   Managerialism stifles creativity and innovation.

   • I had an employee ask me recently what I think of the Program Management Professional (PMP) certification. I laughed and told him that I see resume after resume touting it…yet program after program fails. It’s a credential that exists as a profit center. It serves no purpose other than to change $2000 for the test, recertification every 3 years, and sales of endless new Volumes filled with the latest buzzwords. It’s the Managerialists’ credentialing gate.

     Now, I too have an MBA. I got it about a decade ago. I’d been in business for 20 years at that point, and could have taught about 2/3 of the classes. The finance stuff was extremely useful, though.

8. A lot of commenters here who like to hammer on “the grillers,” are revealing their inner griller! Sports ball is the definitive “griller” tell.

   • Sports and grilling are fine and healthy. They exist among men of every culture in every historical period. Problem is with escapism and denial, and with corporate/poliitical capture of these things. Nobody who has found his way to this forum is unaware of that problem, rather it’s a main topic. Lighten up.

   • I’ve never put on any airs that I was DR from birth. Getting here was a process.

     There was a time when I could have rattled off for you, from memory, in order, every Hypesman trophy winner from Jay Berwanger to Reggie Bush.

     Perhaps the disdain for the griller is based not in disdain for grilling, but on their refusal to recognize the world changing around them. In their obedience to propaganda that is so transparently false. Knowing first hand, as we do, that it’s not that difficult to recognize it or see through it. Indeed, that it is painfully obvious.

9. I come at this issue as an old Big East basketball fan. BEB was a creation of Dave Gavitt and ESPN, back in the old days. So yeah, it was a “made for TV” basketball conference. That said, it put eastern basketball, scattered as it was among independents, back into the national picture. The rivalries made complete sense: St Johns, Providence, Boston College, Connecticut, Syracuse, Georgetown, Seton Hall,
   and Villanova: The longest drive between schools was maybe five hours. It was a great league, and over time it developed a national following. It brought respect back to northeastern hoops in the post-UCLA era, culminating in the mid-80s around the time Larry Bird emerged as the white god-emperor of NBA hoops. Good times for a white boy growing up in western New York, bored by the annual Kentucky/ NC/ UCLA /Indiana ‘who wins this year’ sleepfest?

   So, I can’t blame TV for everything. It gave me that 80s Big East, and it was a blast. Of course in those days guys like Derrick Coleman and Pat Ewing played for 4 years, like they were real college players or something. Shit, nowadays a freshman scores twenty points in a NCAA tourney game and they’re already hiring an agent. It’s all shit. It’s all a swindle, and – to be clear – I don’t blame some kid at “college” grabbing easy cash as quickly as they can… the last college game I ever saw, in late 2018, was Murray State versus Belmont; there was this black dude on Murray who, just in warmups, was so ridiculously, obviously good, that I – as an aside to my brother – said, that kid be goin’ to the NBA at the end of the season. He led the team in scoring, assists, and rebounding (as a sophmore) that night. Yeah, sure, Belmont, but still…

   That was Ja Morant. Now, Ja Morant is a good basketball player. That said, if you watch his ‘highights’ on YT or whatever, he enjoys playing in a league that no longer allows defense. So his acrobatics are just that – acrobatics. Like Z says, it’s just a flea-market.

   Recently I saw an old interview with Wilt Chamberlian, assessing Michael Jordan. He was pretty, shall we say, ambiguous in his judgement: He allowed that MJ was a fantastic player, but he did point out that back in the days when big men ruled the paint, it was not wise to hot-dog, to disrespect the big men, aka Chamberlain himself, Reed, Thurmond, Cowens, Gilmore, Walton, Unseld… it was understood that you are going to get hurt if you pull stunts like reverse dunks and shit like that.

   • Well I grew up as an ACC bball fan and remember the hood old days of the “ACC-Big East Challenge”, so you must share my disgust at the basic merging of the conferences? Seeing all those Yankee teams in the ACC is just…not right, Haven’t watched in a decade+.

10. You see this managerial trend in the music industry, as well. Record companies, always horrible, at least were willing to grow talent and give the artist time to develop. Now, the songs are made by committee to catch the ear of the mindless masses for a short while, then they (the songs), being insipid, are forgotten forever. Another loss of legacy.
    Though a classic rocker, I do enjoy obscure other genres. One of my favorites from outside rock is Mac Wiseman. I was listening to his stirring version of “Barbara Allan” a couple weeks ago. That song has been around since the middle ages. And as I was listening to it, all I could think was that my generation would be the last to know this song.
    They paved paradise – and put in a parking lot hehe.

    • The decline of music is an unfortunate symptom of the increases in computing power that really picked up at the start of the 21st century.

      To me, this is clear proof that technological progress is not an unalloyed good.

      • Neil Young was onto something back in the 90’s. Not that he foresaw the computer (including mp3 players and cell phones) overtaking the CD, but he was sounding the alarm about the sterility of music that digitalization was causing.

      • Few people wanted to watch “Yo! MTV Raps!” in the late 80s and 90s. It was imposed from above by those who control what music is promoted. Why would they do that?

11. I sat in on one of the Western Civ lessons I am putting my posterity through this summer. Spent a bit on the Colloseum, Circus Maximus. Man the bread and circuses were way better than sportsball.

    No play by play guy with a 72 IQ telling me that the team with the ball is down 4 points so they have to score a touchdown. A field goal won’t work because it is only 3 points. So they need a touchdown, Repeating over and over.

    Man. They did historical battle re-enactments. Flood the collosseum and put some battleships in it and re-enact sea battles with Carthage with the Romans turning their vessels into ramming ships to turn it into a land battle at sea. Have a battle with tigers and lions coming up through trap doors. No cheerleaders, but real women, naked and charming coming up to you naked selling you wine with the wink of an eye and rubbing her bubbies in your face. Motor boat!!!!

    I mean, if you are going to give your bread to the circus, do it right. And at least a life is on the line, not some dead soul less game where the 57 IQ star of the game is going to tell you he gave it 110% and rattle off 5 other worn cliches. No. Give me some feral Gallic tribesman fighting a Macedonian warrior on elephant back with deadly snakes on the floor of the arena. Do it right man!

    What I wouldn’t give to have Shonqavius and Dovantique Vaginavicious have to do an end zone dance where a trap door opens and a shark tank opens up on them while the end zone seats are given bloody fish to throw in the tank. The 500 different tv screens and light displays flash, FEEDING FRENZY!!!! Then watch the super fans weep and sob as their prized vicarious living gets savaged by a gaggle of rabid sharks. Muh fantasy league is blown now. As the poor whigga in his backward baseball hat and gold chain and diamond ear rings sees his entire reason for living gone before his eyes.

    That would be one hell of a way to end this absolutely craven poor sportsmanship this ghetto garbage has unleashed on our once honor laden culture. That would also be a Hunger Games I could sanction.

    I got back from lunch in this all white town of big trucks and cowboy hats. The bar had country videos on. What garbage that is. They all look like gangster rappers and while on another screen some black tv show host Oprah wanna-be had an all black audience and guest list, country tv was filled with latinxs, mulattos and blacks as cops and army men … … This thing is circling the drain. Could we at least get shark tanks and lion dodging incorporated into football and basketball before the entire ship sinks? Let them at least earn their bravado and justify the tough guy swagger.

12. Decline of college football opens up a discussion about the decline of regional identity, particularly the strength of a distinct southern identity. Maybe I’m wrong: I’ll leave that argument to the southerners.

    Related to that is the racial angle. It was before my time but arguably the rise to power of 1960s powerhouses like Michigan State relative to the southern teams was their willingness to integrate the team. Whether that was truly a football argument or a political argument masked as a football argument I don’t know.

    It’s not all cultural though. Some of it is technology. The romance of the “Bowl” system was the idea that two very good teams largely unknown to each other, from vastly differing regions of the country would get together at the end of the year and play. From at least the birth of cable television, the standardization of the game and its organization into mega-conferences and a pro-style playoff was baked in the cake.

    Paying the players will be the end though. Decades in the future the “College” football teams will be pro franchises bearing the names of the universities they once represented (I think many European and South American football clubs actually began this way…as student or workingmen’s teams that professionalized over the decades). Totally foreseeable, but as usual it was misplaced liberal kindness that won the day. The idea that “poor kids” were being “exploited” by “the system” … young black men sacrificing their bodies for a multi-billion dollar enterprise or something like that, is not something Normie can long resist.

    • This is what happens when individuals in the here and the now mean everything, and institutions, with histories and traditions reaching back one-and-a-half centuries, mean nothing. The institutions are trampled into the dust by big black boots with smiley faces painted on the heels.

    • Southern identity is fainter, much fainter in the urban areas, but still a thing and relatively strong even in some besieged corners of cities. It scares the Regime to death because Southern identity is ultimately a very white identity. Some have made any analogy to Wales staying Welsh and that seems about right.

      SEC football has become atrocious and effectively part of the Regime. You can probably trace that to Ol’ Miss giving up the Rebel battle flag. Still, there is a Southern heartbeat to it. Panning out to the other much smaller leagues in the South–the ACC and OVC, although those include non-Southern teams, for example–and the identity is unintentional yet palpable. That may be erased but it seems anything not eliminated by now is probably here to stay because the Regime is losing hold even though all seems lost. I doubt it happens, but the re-appearance of the Confederate battle flag at games would mark a very real turn in the tide, rolling or not.

13. ‘Social capital’ is a great concept to use, but that’s because we live in a soulless time full of soulless people. Selling your soul is kind of presupposed in the idea of social capital, isn’t it? But that’s what gets through, because this soul business is superstition, heh heh.

14. Direct download, direct download, direct download

    https://api.spreaker.com/download/episode/56431953/ep_288_the_tragedy_of_managerialism.mp3

15. Don King did a lot to destroy boxing. In fact, boxing might still be a big mainstream sport had been kept in prison where he belonged after murdering someone.

    But the boxing commissions didn’t help. The sanctioning bodies didn’t help (how many champions are there in every weight class today?) HBO and Showtime didn’t help. The boxers themselves don’t help by not wanting to fight very often. Sugar Ray Robinson fought 200 professional fights. Though high at the time, numbers like this are unheard of today.

    The final blow was MMA. But I don’t think MMA could have gotten off the ground had boxing not been in collapse.

    • I had some interest in watching boxing as a kid in the late 80s and early 90s. The big fights were all on Pay Per View and the undercard didn’t finish until after 10 PM. Then you had Tyson knocking people out in 2-3 minutes and people got sick of paying for that. It all contributed to killing public interest.

    • Early ultimate fighting, back when McCain et al. were threatening to outlaw it, was wild entertainment that any man could enjoy. Now it’s in the same fully formalized and over-exploited state that heavyweight boxing was circa Tyson.

      I have a friend whose actual paying job is UFC roundup commentary. He pirates the PPV fights—or, if he can’t find a feed at the last minute, hurries out to a neighborhood boxer bar that shows them without license. Nobody thinks the price is right.

      • I don’t get the appeal of MMA. The first little part of each round is exciting, but once they clinch up… jiu-jitsu is not exactly telegenic. I respect the skill it takes to learn those techniques but as somebody who doesn’t know martial arts himself, it’s not very interesting. Boxing requires no special knowledge to appreciate.

    • I disagree with HBO having anything to do with the decline of boxing. I thin the opposite actually–when they pulled out 4 or 5 years ago, that was truly the end. HBO brought us Barrera-Morales (free!) Gatti-Ward (free!!! I think maybe the 3rd one was PPV) and fights that would be $90 a pop now (if they could even make them) were pretty much happening monthly. Boxing After Dark, Saturday Night Fights…man…I could list 40 or 50 very special fights I saw on HBO in the 90’s-2000’s just from memory–Oh my God…Chavez-Taylor! Berto-Ortiz! Trinidad-Vargas! Bradley-Prodnikov! And if HBO was still a player, then we could actually watch guys like Monster Inoue (check out some You Tube on that guy) fight without getting up at 3:00 in the morning — and he would be an actual semi-mainstream star, as would Crawford, Loma, Uzik, et al.

      • I too watched all those fights, but none of them were “free,” they were on HBO. On top of the HBO monthly subscription, you had to have a basic cable package. Back in the day, huge fights like Holmes Norton (awesome fight) was on network TV.

16. Great show today. I guess it begs the question as to what is the answer to this managerial bureaucratic blob that has literally taken over all aspects of our lives, culture and traditions? I suppose one can add in all the third world colored garbage flooding in like crap from a busted sewer line – as if any of those turds are going to give two s**** about the big Ohio state vs Michigan game or UCLA vs USC… These are largely White traditions (as usual) getting trashed. Well, just like the US government leviathan, it’ll never be peacefully reformed, so something else will have to happen.

17. Huh. I usually download your Friday talk and listen on the road, but today, with no Direct Download, I just read the precis, then the comments, figuring I’d just have to listen to it later.

    Turns out the precis was accurate, I guess, but very easy to end up with the wrong impression, particularly after reading the comments. I wasn’t the only one who was likely surprised to hear your actual message, instead of what we assumed it would be. 😉

    • Podbean app for direct download. Thanks to whoever uploads it by the way. Maybe Z himself?

18. Interestingly enough UFC was bought by a publicly traded corporation a few years ago. The parent company has now purchased WWE. Managerialism reigns.

    • I do not care for the NFL, but the fact is its viewership and profits keep on growing. And coincidentally the NFL has not given into managerialism. The owners retain control through a commissioner who they hire (or fire).

19. I grew up sporting, and I still enjoy watching sports, but it’s not something I go out of my way to do. Never got too deep into the sportsball thing, although I lived with some aspiring sports journalists in college, so I was around it. NFL draft used to be Saturday/Sunday, and we’d grill and drink all weekend. It was fun, I’ll admit. Penn State football was fun. No whiteouts then. The attitude was sort of antisocial. They’d score, you’d cheer for a couple of seconds, and then you’d turn around to look out for drinks hurtling down from above lol. “We don’t know the goddam words…”

    I lived to see the Phillies win a world series and the Eagles win a super bowl. That satisfied something, and I don’t care as much as I used to. Watched the world series, the NFC championship, and the super bowl last year— that’s it. Disappointed, but not upset like I used to get. I’d still like to see Penn State get a chip (I was too young when they did). They might have a shot these next couple of years, who knows.

    • I agree that something changes once you’ve seen your teams win championships.

      For me, my interest has waned as my boyhood heroes have aged, retired, and even passed away.

      The rise of free agency has ensured there won’t be any replacements other than a bunch of random names from random places.

20. College football was one of my greatest passions as a young adult. That passion slowly died in the 2010’s during the peak of the Nick Saban era.

    The arms race that college football coaching has become has ruined something that was once great.

    My roots are with the Tennessee Volunteers in the SEC. Say what you will about Phillip Fulmer, he is/was Tennessee to the cell nucleus. So was his predecessor, Johnny Majors.

    When I think of college football, I think of crisp autumn leaves and orange and white from end zone to end zone at Neyland stadium. I think of booing Alabama fans, and I think of Steve Spurrier’s fun and gun Gator offense putting up gaudy numbers while Peyton Manning valiantly tried to carry the Vols on his shoulders.

    I think of black athletes too, God love the ones that really loved the sport and weren’t thugs. I think of Reggie White RIP.

    But I have grown to hate it. The very thought of a college athlete legally being paid huge endorsement money is beyond sickening. The game lost its purity and innocence.

    Yet, these kids who are making more money than me to throw a ball around on Saturdays are still going to be political complainers who lecture us all about “privilege”. And their white coaches are going to facilitate the stage for their b1tc**ng.

    It’s sickening.

    • The money corrupted the sport long before the athletes got such an open and public piece of it. The precedent of (often mediocre) coaches and administrators getting theirs just made it a matter of time until the players got theirs. If anybody had cared about retaining the amateurism of the sport, they’d have put the money into some kind of tuition fund instead of paying the coach $5 million a year.

    • Oh, man. SEC fans are the best and the worst. If we could channel their enthusiam towards something that actually mattered…

      I gradually tuned out when Spurrier came back to Gainesville. He was a classless piece of shit. Whined like a bitch, threw his hat, defended joggers who slammed womens’ heads into mailboxes, and shit-talked his players in public.

      This kind of bad example filters on down to the fans and sooner or later you get Brian Tew and Wesley Ormsbee beaten to death after a game. I’m not saying Spurrier had blood on his hands, but still. And managerialism just went along with alll of it, so long as Spurrier won.

      We a long way from Bear Bryant.

      • Oh I agree on all counts.

        Fulmer swept a lot of jogger bullshit under the rug too.

        And that really *is* the defining feature of college football since the 1990s. The willingness of a coach to cover up thug behavior is proportional to his salary and sometimes his winning percentage, until the obsession with winning reaches a critical mass where the jogger behavior weighs down the team.

        The aforementioned Johnny Majors was run out of town NOT because he was a poor coach. It was because he didn’t coddle black athletes and would sometimes drop the N bomb. The boosters couldn’t handle that. They love joggerball way too much.

        • Let’s be real: losing to Alabama 7 years in a row was what got Majors fired. If he’d won 7 in a row against Alabama, the boosters would have tolerated all the rest.

          • Right. But I think he was starting to lose the recruiting wars because the black athletes were complaining. This probably has something to do with the decline in talent. Fulmer’s big sell was his recruiting ability. Recruiting has always been a defining necessity with the Tennessee program, because there isn’t a lot of black talent in East Tennessee, so recruiters like Fulmer were cherry picking players from Ohio, Michigan etc.

21. Spectator sporting events (going all the way back to the days of the Greek Olympics and Roman Coliseum) have served the purpose of allowing citizens to blow off steam by vicariously experiencing testosterone-fueled competition in lieu of spearing a mammoth on the steppe. And this is an important social need even in the present.

    The destruction of the sports-based pressure relief valve is a ticking time bomb, especially in light of the rising Crazy in our current political affairs. Men need a regular outlet for repressed frustration or you get random road rage incidents and unpredictable mass shootings. The spring winds tighter and its best to loosen this tension gradually and often.

    Clearly the Globalists are going all in on the Crazy Train escalation and a pressure cooker of biblical proportions is in the making. And when it blows, LEOs are going to be utterly unprepared for the immensity of the blow back. It will be ugly, but it will also be foggy. This fog is your friend.

    • I disagree with this.

      I don’t believe spectator sports serve any such salutary purpose as allowing people to “blow off steam.” Quite the opposite. They gin up totally artificial passions that waste a lot of time and money, and divert attention away from actually useful activities.

      • My father was a Marine who fought in both theaters (Pacific and Europe) during WW2 and then came home to raise a family while working in a wire forming factory for the rest of his life. He was not a man to get crosswise with. He also played football in college and became a lifelong diehard fan. That fandom kept him sane and out of jail. In my direct experience, it was a safety valve for many men of that bygone era.

        • My vote is with TomA in this dispute.

        • That’s because there were men in those times, and not victims of emasculating feminism, and its later offshoot, the Cult of Safety.

    • It was telling that the Bread And Circuses didn’t take a year off for the plandemic. Granted the NCAA Tournament got cancelled that spring.

      People complain about them, but publicly funded stadiums make perfect sense when you consider the regime’s interest in keeping the bread and circuses going.

    • Judging by the popularity of Gμn Br0ker dot com and the gμn related vidya on the internet, I definitely get the feeling that the average teenaged White boy in Amurrikkkuh today is vastly moar interested in rif1es than in footballs.

      If so, it definitely bodes well for our side…

      /FED-P0AST

    • Whoever down voted you are morons. You are spot on!

22. So, Zman, you’re saying we’ve adopted the values of rootless cosmopolitans?

    I gleaned this week that the War on culture is fought by means of…hiring.

    Birds of a feather flock together.
    Mafiosi, criminals, hustlers; tribals, racials, pervs, incompetents, ditzes; the subservient, the dedicated, the satanic.

    Academic, political, military, managerial- name a sector, any sector.
    In a meritocracy- say, cattle ranching or the trades- you know who knows their stuff. They have to.

    The butterflies use the hiring process to reward friends and punish enemies; combined with the riskless anonymity of limited liability incorporation, the nits seek low/no risk and can therefore issue increasing demands.

    It all started with sheep-herding.

    Sheep, you see, graze down to the roots, so nothing grows back. Cows only graze the tops, and their manure replenishes the rich microbiome of healthy soil.

    Sheep must be kept moving.
    Cows reward staying in place.
    Farmers, also, are tied to one place.

    Relatives, intermarried because most people didn’t travel far from their fields, and women could travel even less, had bit of a squabble. The shepherd’s sheep ruined the farmer’s land.

    So the farmer killed his brother, the shepherd; blood and soil have ever been in conflict with shepherd nomads.

    Today we have the values and shallow transactionalism of the rootless flitting from pasture to pasture, grazing until the soil is destroyed and off they and their various flocks go. One cannot build to last unless roots are laid down, orchards planted in whose shade of we shall not sit.

    The hiring. How do we vet and control the hiring?

    • (Dammit! Addendum.)

      That’s what “voting” is meant to be, after all: a hiring process.

      But it’s been circumvented by corporates, and then, NGOs and dark pools.

23. Trading on some insights I’ve gained from reading “The WEIRDEST People in the World,” it seems to me the Commons is a vestige from feudal Europe when kinship-based societies were still “common” PTP. It has to be put on life support in the modern West where the individual is ascendant. So it only exists in a romanticized form, a fiction really.

    The latest over-the-top rhetoric was during the Covid scare. Sorry if I don’t feel any affinity for my so-called “fellow Americans.” Not getting an experimental jab or experimental anything unless it benefits me and mine.
    .

    • It’s the mobility. Modern mobility is the “shattering effect of modernity.”

    • Tom K: “Not getting an experimental jab or experimental anything unless it benefits me and mine.”

      The moast fascinating story I’ve seen in forever was poasted just yesterday at the UK Daily Mail:

      “Facebook’s black market sperm industry exposed: Wannabe moms too poor to afford $30,000 IVF are being lured into having unprotected sex or forced to meet men they met online in parking lots to swap semen samples”
      https://tinyurl.com/yyepftnv

      The moast fascinating aspect of the story is that all these lesbians [who desperately want children] are claiming to be NOT-v@xxed.

      Which, in turn, means that even the very moast militant of the dykes know that the v@xxines are PURE POISON.

      I’ma be keeping an eagle eye on this Facebook phenomenon for, gosh, maybe the next decade or moar.

      This a psycho-sociological mother lode needing to be mined by White Alpha Chads.

      And I don’t necessarily mean in terms of humiliating the poor girls.

      I’m talking about luring White lesbians out of the (((Klownworld Insanity))) and back into sane rational moral White motherhood.

      MOTHER.

      LODE.

      • Can you believe all these cucks giving away their sperm for free

      • I’m not giving away my sperm to just anybody. No vibrants need apply. And no ugly women need apply either.

        • Having White children with an hideously ugly White bu11dyke is infinitely better than going to your grave never having sired any White children at all.

          INFINITELY BETTER.

24. The problems in football are deep and multifaceted. Would this make the game more fun to watch

    – 120 plays from scrimmage
    – instead of 3 downs you get 12 plays to get touchdown
    – each team gets 30 passes

    The goal would be to have more wacky and fun to watch plays that function as the football equivalent of a “home run”. So like the tackled QB who pitches to the outside and the play goes 70 yards. Or a simple possession pass to a tight end who then pitches it to an uncovered receiver. Also watching someone get stuffed for a loss of seven is also a home run in a way

    • Since they outlawed playing defense it isn’t really football anymore. Changing the number of downs or whatever can’t fix that.

      • Yep. Watch a Raiders vs Steelers game from the 70’s and you will see real pro football.

    • This sounds a lot like what they did to baseball in Futurama.

      Fry: Hmm, so they finally jazzed it up?

      Or what O’Biden wants to do to the Supreme Court. I supposed everything in our Klown Kulture will get some kind of Idiocracy treatment eventually. I can’t wait until overturning the table and throwing your rook at your opponent is a valid move in Chess.

25. Reverse Gell Mann Amnesia effect going on with your show today Zman. On this occasion when you do a show about something with which I am intimately familiar and knowledgeable, you nailed it.

    A lot of boomers and xers are going to have to die off before CFB really “declines,” especially in the south, where it is still bigger than Jesus, and Jesus is pretty big there.

    If there is to be a final nail in CFB’s coffin (while the boomers and xers yet live), it will probably be a gambling scandal, which is a bigger problem than anybody wants to talk about. They will exert great effort (no doubt have exerted great effort) to keep that on the down low. The managers would rather tolerate it than risk upsetting the apple cart by letting it come to light.

    Once the boomers and xers are gone, so will the widespread popularity of CFB be gone with them. If not sooner.

    • Eh, I don’t think normies really care.

      I mean we had an NBA ref that openly described how he and his colleagues shaded games a certain way.

      Several years ago the NFL reversed a pick 6 at the end of a game (I want to say Pittsburgh-San Diego) that swung $120 million in bets back to the house in Vegas.

      Not a peep from normie.

26. Best show of the year, Z. Or, at least, definitely in the top five. “The Commons” is basically my life in a nutshell. Put as little as you can in, take out as much as you can, because the other guy is doing the same and he’ll screw you over and throw you to the wolves if there’s a nickel in it for him.

    How do you fix this with anything short of a purge, or a civil war or revolution?

    • One of your very best. Ought to be required listening on the right. Sometimes have disagreed with you on occasion, but this, this podcast was a masterpiece.

27. I earned two degrees from two different SEC schools back in the late 80s/early 90s. Needless to say, I was immersed in CFB and, to a lesser extent, CBB. Then long about the mid/late 90s I began to notice the playing fields getting increasingly darker. Before long, it was unusual to even see a single white playing defense. Then came the avalanche of black qbs and soon even the offenses became majority black. My interest and viewership certainly began to wane, mostly for that reason but also for time constraints with work and family. And finally, the inevitable – maybe about 10 -12y ago I was watching one of my alma maters playing another SEC team and ALL 22 starting players on the field were black. 100%. That was pretty much it for me, and frankly all team sports. Quit BB many years before that when even by the 90s it was unusual to NOT see 10 blacks on the court in any major CBB match up. But sometimes you have to look closely – you can be fooled from the wide-angle court view thinking there are two or three whites out there only to be brought back to reality when they zoom in and you notice those “whites” are just light-skinned mulattos, their white mothers cheering them from the stands (frequent close ups on the mothers) and the kid’s black father usually nowhere to be seen, probably since conception. So F all team sportsball. They’re all utterly corrupted.

    The only sport I’ve watched for the past several years has been men’s singles tennis, especially Novak Djokovic. His rock-solid anti-vax commitment was truly inspiring, not to mention his family and spiritual values, as well. Virtually the whole tennis and sports world was against him, not to mention the entire MSM media. Despite being barred from two grand slam events, he still has won more singles title than any man in history… and counting. But I’m sure when he retires, I’ll stop watching even that. Good riddance.

    • Guessing you’re a Bama grad. Saban’s team’s have typically been darker than a chunk of onyx at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

      • The OL has actually gotten more white with Saban than it was in the years preceding him. Football coaches always said, from way back, that you put the smart big guys on the OL and the dumb big guys on the DL.

28. Is that a cat that I hear in the background?

29. Facemasks destroyed football and indoor smoking bans destroyed America.

    Theogenes wrote about this.

    Little League baseball is now the only sport worth watching.

    • I’ll be heading off to Williamsport in a week, the 5th or 6th time I’ve gone to the LL World Series. It has always been a fantastic event to attend, a throwback in terms of the crowds and the light-hearted thrill of the games.

      That said, I was watching some regional tournaments yesterday and the rot is creeping in to the game at even the youngest levels. The players imitate what they see on TV, so after every RBI double, they stand on second and bellow at their own dugout while gesticulating like a primate. Wins are celebrated by that same innane group bounce that MLB players have been using for 30 years. Coaches have learned that microphones are present when they give their pep talks or consolation speeches, so they choke up like women because they know it will get them praise from the pozzed out announcers on ESPN. The players too tend to cry far more often than they used to, which isn’t related to baseball in particular but indicates a softening of our culture. Fifty years ago the Bad News Bears reacted to their season-ending loss by cracking open beers and having a good time. Today, the kids are prone to sobbing, while a noble manager tries to pick up their spirits (and don’t forget the ubiquitous crowd shots of the moms – always the moms – fretting over their little snowflakes).

      I still recommend anyone go to Williamsport if they get a chance, but the writing’s on the wall.

      • Fifty years ago the Bad News Bears reacted to their season-ending loss by cracking open beers and having a good time.

        Tanner Boyle: Hey Yankees… you can take your apology and your trophy and shove ’em straight up your ass! 🤣

        Man, hadn’t thought of that movie in years. Checking IMDb for The Bad News Bears shows quotes that would make today’s Woke Lefties have kittens if they heard the lines.

        Truly it was a different world.

        • I’m surprised that the movie hasn’t been completely erased from existence based solely off the character of Tanner. We all know the line that couldn’t be uttered today!

          • The line about the composition of the team?

            Yeah, that would make heads explode 🤯

          • Think I might slap a “Tanner for President” sticker on my Malibu.

        • I’ve got it on DVD. Great slice of Americana. It was remade several years ago. Didn’t watch it. Didn’t have to. I have no doubt whatsoever that they desecrated the original.

      • Even white players in a relatively white sport like baseball typically behave like pavement apes. They’ve been coached well. Guess it won’t be long before golfers at the British Open begin gyrating and bellowing like loons when they hole a three-foot putt to record a par on the 8th hole. The TV cameras and the networks love it when whites abandon all dignity and sink to the level of negroid primitives.

        • That’s because the pitcher isn’t allowed to nail the batter with a fastball in the ear so they wouldn’t dare to pull that shit ever again. You disrespected the game in front of a guy like Nolan Ryan, he’d make sure you paid for it.

        • Not hockey

          That’s why the government is always trying to push a “culture change”

          • There’s definitely a trend toward jogger-like posturing in hockey, not to mention the all-sizzle-no-steak presentation of the sport on TV. Hockey Night In Canada during the 70’s, 80’s, and into the 90’s was a television program by and for white men and it was glorious.

            Last season, the Maple Leafs invited a collective of cross dressers to “entertain” fans entering the building. That they weren’t frog marched out onto Bay Street is a sign that hockey is terminally ill.

    • “…and indoor smoking bans destroyed America.”

      Absolutely. What was once a lively and raucous place- all in good-natured fun- has become cold, sterile, and suspicious.

    • ex-poster factotum: Facemasks destroyed football.

      Technically speaking, I’d argue that it was a combination of:

      1) Non-player coaches, and

      2) The Platoon System.

      If only players could be coaches, i.e. if the players coached themselves [calling their own plays & making their own decisions for each snap of the football], then the players would need average IQs of 115 or moar.

      And if there were no substitutions – if everyone played effectively the entire game – then the players’ body types would quickly come to resemble the body types of e.g. middle- to long-distance runners, if not the body types of Olympic swimmers.

      In other words, without professional coaches & infinite substitution patterns, the game of football would very quickly become lily White [with maybe the occasional North African or East African or Central Asian or Pacific Islander thrown in for good measure].

      It’s all in the rules.

      If (((you))) own the rules, then (((you))) own the enterprise.

30. Z, you should look into European soccer and the soul-destroying changes brought about by big money since the 1980s. Now, of course, we’re at the end game (pun intended) as the guys with the most cash (Gulf Arabs) are buying up teams, players & no doubt shamelessly bribing behind the scenes. The howls of outrage from out-greeded, out-monied sanctimonious Euros is fun to behold.

    • I can see their point, though. Just like no one asked for their country to be flooded with cultural aliens, no one asked for a harmless past time, one that to some degree promoted the bonds of local communities, to turn into a third world bazaar.

      For example, if you were a Liverpool fan in 2001 you still had Scousers like Michael Owen, Steve Gerard, Robbie Fowler, and Jamie Carragher on your squad. Today, the only local boy on the team is a mulatto, and nearly the entire rest of the team speaks English as a second language (although some might say that’s true of Liverpudlians too!). They have no ties to your community or you beyond a paycheck with the club’s name affixed.

      I’d look back at what was and say, “who thought this was a good idea??”

      • I’d look back at what was and say, “who thought this was a good idea??”

        (((Who))) thought this was a good idea.

        (((Who)))/Whom?

        – St Joseph Djugashvili

    • Any examples of Europeans howling in outrage?

      As a European I’m more annoyed about Americans bringing their money and poz into our game. As for sanctinmony; I guess we’re not exceptional like you Merkins with your shining city on a hill!

      Must be weird for a Merkin to see a sport where the majority of men on the pitch are white

      • That’s not accurate. The big bucks in English football, the ones that completely changed the game, came from the likes of Roman Abramovich (Russian (((oligarch)))) and the oil ticks from Abu Dhabi that bought Manchester City. As for the poz, the jogger and fag worship was entirely a product of the F.A. and the clubs, nothing to do with Yanks.

      • Brits and Euros rightly conplain about the exportation of American junk culture but the motto “Get Racism Out of Football” was a British import to USA.

31. And by the way, that player from my school when he wasn’t in school, had elementary schooil aged kids selling crack for him at the YMCA. I ran into his team mates at a reunion who became cops. They say he died getting his head blown off at point blank range in some gang/drug dispute gone bad.

    Another scholar athlete turning his life around.

    • I prefer the terms,

      “stoodant affaleet”

      or

      “skollah affaleet”

32. “Managerialism is rule by a committee of people looking for a better job. They have no investment in the current job, other than what they need to do in order to maximize their return. It is a form of tragedy of the commons, except we pretend it is free market capitalism.”

    Pure gold. The flea circus is the perfect analogy as well.

    A long time ago, at my high school the basketball coach wanted to win and move up and into college coaching. That pathway is to win big in high school, develop a pipeline of players from the ghetto. You get one star, own him emotionally and get him to sign with your team on the condition you get an assistant coaching job, or you just have a big pool of players and bring them with you to a college job.

    He did that with a star player with an NBA body and lower D-I skills. The player never attended school. On gameday , the coach sent some players in his car to pick him up and made sure he went to the required four classes to be eligible to play that day. The four classes were all with the coach. The cross town rival had a player who struggled to make the NBA but found a niche on a multiple time NBA champion. The NBA PR gurus turned him into an all american boy. In reality, one of my favorite teacher’s wives was harshly yelled at and threatened by him. There were zero consequences. He also assaulted multiple females by choking them out in violent rages. But, the world knows him as an angel thanks to the NBA.

    This was a long time ago. Even the high school system was deeply corrupt.

    Turn the flea circus off – entirely. It is, like the rest of this anti-culture, poison. We have a rich heritage of aristocratic treasures. Let’s all commit to immersing ourselves in that so it can be preserved. The clock is ticking and we need to move our culture’s treasures from the half yard line to the preservation end zone and fast. In the process, we will be enriched and enobled beyond our wildest dreams.

    I am doing my part. I am going to get my Mom off of the primitive singing bowl new age garbage to the Bach chorales – the foundation of her Church’s liturgy that towers over some person knocking a bowl with a stick and running up and down your body.

    Ready! Set! Go!

    • Even the high school system was deeply corrupt.

      I grew up and lived in the Chicagoland area until late last decade. The stories of inner city high schools like King, Simeon, etc. “poaching” star bakka-ball players from each other were legendary.

      I was stunned 😳 to see White kids playing basketball in high school in my new home state.

      • Moved to Iceland, did ya’?

    • Yes, you are in the right track in your effort to get Mom to listen to the truly inspired works of Bach written for liturgical use in the Lutheran Church, Ad Gloriam Dei, as the master himself professed.

      My wife and I were listening to several of his solo catatas last night performed by the amazingly talented French vocalist, Sabine Devielhe. A bunch of albums with her performing are to be found at Apple Music’s newly expanded classical channel, works both sacred and secular, but when she is using her God-given gifts, one could almost be forgiven to not arbitrarily draw a red line between genres.

      Also recently enjoyed Keith Jarrett’s album of selected keyboard sonatas composed by Karl Phillip Emanuel Bach, the eldest of The Old Wig’s children.

      The Western classical musical tradition is a well-nigh inexhaustible well of great art, and extending back into Medieval times. Seek out recordings by such artists as Jordi Savall, the Tallis Singers, or from an earlier generation, the keyboardist/conductor Gustav Leonhardt, if you wish to extend your knowledge backwards in time and into delightful corners of which you likely know little to nothing. Here’s another one for you, the violinist Suzanne Lautenbacher’s accomplished, and simultaneously spiritually aware performances of the Rosary Sonatas of Ignaz Franz Biber von Biber, works that masterfully employ scordatura tunings, alternate tunings, to enable truly wonderful possibilities in multiple-stoppings in these works composed to convey the Joys, Sorrows, and Mysteries of the Blessed Virgin.

      Okay, I’ll stop now…

      • Correction, that should be the Tallis Scholars. We have seen them live twice in Philadelphia, and if the opportunity presents, they are not to be missed. Their recordings are awesome, but to hear them perform live in an appropriate environment, on those occasions in a fairly large, but acoustically ideal church, was amazing. This latest time, they programmed an entire Mass composed by Josquin des Pres.

        • I love to listen to the Earth Quake Mass and watch the sunset from someplace high up. They must be amazing to experience in person in a cathedral.

33. College Feetsball’s rotten core is no better exemplified by Penn State, Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno and the reaction of Normies to it.

    • I’ve got a story from my Big 10 alma mater as well. I can’t remember this guy’s name and I’m not going to bother searching for it right now, but he was either a center or played another position on the offensive line so he was massive. He got into some kind of argument with a guy outside a bar and he ended up beating the guy to death!

      Now I now this will be a big shock to you, but what passed for justice in my college town entailed just giving the guy a slap on the wrist. He was back on the field playing football before the guy he murdered was even cold.

      • Running back Lawrence Phillips was a monster and Nebraska coach Tom Osborne knew it. But he needed Phillips to help him win a national title, so he ignored Phillips’ atrocities, and the Grillers in Nebraska found that just peachy. He ultimately went to prison where he choked a cellmate to death.

      • At USC I met Darrell Russell. He was 19 years old, 6’6″ and already 300lbs. Never seen a bigger or dumber man. Made millions then destroyed his career with drugs before dying in a car wreck.

        • Such a tragedy…

        • I’m looking at Darrell Russell’s Wikipedia picture right now, and judging from the physiognomy, I’m guessing an IQ of about 77.5.

          How the heck the SoCal admissions orifice approved his studenthood would be beyond muh ability to imagine.

          I wonder how many White coeds he r@ped?

      • A 6’8 300+ former Florida St lineman once threatened me, and being a sensible person I shut up real quick

    • We will never know the whole story of what went down at Penn St. There were a lot of wild rumors at the time about the “true” breadth of it, and there was probably some truth somewhere in those rumors, but we’ll never know. It’s obvious now in hindsight, if it wasn’t so obvious at the time, that Louis Freeh’s job was to cover up, not to investigate. Because that’s who he is and what he does. If they wanted a real investigation, they’d have gotten someone else. If you want a cover up, Freeh is your man.

      • Didn’t a local DA investigating the PSU situation simply vanish into thin air back around 2005 or so?

      • Well, the FBI personnel “have form” with cover-ups, as the Brits might say, something unmistakably visible in recent times.

      • Jeffrey Zoar: “(((Louis Freeh)))’s job was to cover up, not to investigate.”

        Bingo.

        Somewhere on the internet, within the last decade or so, a magazine or newspaper story was circulating on the internet, wherein a reporter had gone in search of Sandusky’s historical victims, and had chanced upon a boy who claimed to have been trafficked by Sandusky through a number of different tony upscale law firms on the East Coast USA.

        That was still rather early in muh contemplation of the JQ, but I knew immediately [instinctually] what the ethnicity of those lawyers must have been.

        Since then, I have searched & searched & searched for that article, but have never been able to find it again.

        That was one of the first instances of memory-holing which I experienced on the internet.

        Nowadays, I save copies of everything.

34. It can’t happen here?
    Oh, yes it can, and is, and has been.
    The erosion of what was once esteemed has spawned some awful trends.
    Sign up for some authenticity experiences, meaning some potted temporary escapism.
    Then return to a walled-off existence where only tolerable incursions are allowed.
    Thanks, neoliberals. GFY

35. Shirttail relative played for Nebraska. FWIW, he was a big white farmboy from Nebraska. One of the late night campfire talks at a patriarch’s funeral, he said something like he didn’t care how the scholarship system worked, that wasn’t why he was there. It was just his only realistic path into the NFL.

    Worked for him, BTW.

36. There is another outcome that you did not consider when the owner of the company has a dispute with management. My father worked for a very large scientific instrument company called Waters Associates when it was still owned by the founder, Jim Waters. Management said we are going to do ‘X.’ Waters said, ‘No don’t do X.’ Management said, “We are going ahead & do X.’ Waters said, ‘If you do X, I will sell the company. Management went ahead and did X and the company was sold. The new owners fired the top level of management.

    • Another telling illustration of the key distinction between ownership and a share in the commons: the old adage “Them that got the gold rules.”
      Managerialism serves the appetite for greed. It thrives amongst those for whom no amount of gold is ever enough. But a wise owner understands that gold is a tool just like manure. It only really works if you spread it around in sufficient amounts to encourage the growth of what you ultimately want to thrive. Hoarded gold does nothing but attract thieves and dragons and other malevolent forces intent only on despoiling it.

37. This is what happens when you’re ruled by a people who have no connection to the society and its history. Even the Medieval kings who often were from another country understood that they needed to respect the local traditions. Our ruling class doesn’t even understand this.

    It’s all about how to monetize the social capital that took many, many generations to develop. It’s basically like denuding a forest for a quick buck and then leaving a land that’s top soil will be eroded away and unusable.

    Our rulers just aren’t built for, well, ruling. They’re built for scheming and manipulating. They will fail. Granted, it could take a long time, but nature always wins.

    • CoaSC: “Our rulers just aren’t built for, well, ruling. They’re built for scheming and manipulating. They will fail. Granted, it could take a long time, but nature always wins.”

      It’s the Passive Aggressive Industrial Complex.

      You simply cannot defeat the PAIC on its terms, using passive aggressive techniques such as LawFare; the PAIC pwns all of that nonsense.

      The only way to break the PAIC’s hold on power is to go Active Aggressive.

      Active Aggression and only Active Aggression can defeat the omnipotent power of Passive Aggression.

      /FED-POAST

      • Well, the real way that you win is by not letting them into your community in the first place and/or excluding from your community members who sell out to the outside merchant class.

        • I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but badly misunderestimating the almighty psycho-sociological power of Passive Aggression*** is an existential mistake to be making in one’s philosophy of Life.

          When [not if, but WHEN] the Passive Aggressive Industrial Complex*** notices you on their psycho-sociological radar [and their radar NEVER SLEEPS], they will destroy you.

          You cannot fight Passive Aggression on Its terms.

          The Passive Aggressives in the Lawfare Industrial Complex will always rule against you, and the Passive Aggressives have even created the legalistic structure by which they require themselves to hire the very moast dull & insipid & thoughtless & inhuman thugs to function as their Praetorian Guard.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test#Jordan_v._New_London

          You cannot defeat this Evil on Its terms.

          It owns the psycho-sociological turf.

          It owns the intelligentsia.

          It owns the media, which is to say, the cultural bullhorn.

          It owns the courts.

          It owns the treasury.

          It owns the thugs [and their precious gubmint pensions].

          Every aspect of our culture has been co-opted and destroyed by Passive Aggression.

          There will be one and only one path out of this dilemma, and it does not involve the s0@p b0x, nor the jury b0x, nor the b@110t b0x.

          You cannot defeat Passive Aggression on Its terms.

          /PHED-P0AST

          ===============

          ***Passive Aggression being largely the same thing as Z’s “Managerialism”.

38. I have heard stories from Boomers about neighborhood guys sitting around in the garage drinking beer and listening to their favorite college games on the radio in the era before all the games being televised. The radio play by play guy was the most popular media guy in the state.

    For people who are committed to attending games it is an all day event built around the entire experience. They walk around the campus, tailgate, listen to the band play and enjoy the entire experience. There is no way it is going to be the same when you are playing a school from 2,500 miles away.

    • I grew up listening to college football–and basketball–games on the radio. In some ways, it was a better experience than watching them on the boob toob.

      • It was better in nearly EVERY way. You could also multi task more effectively.

39. Garrett Hardin is guy you referred to.

    I had a professor in college who thought he was a big deal. Made a big impression on me.

    • Hardin was an ardent immigration restrictionist. A close reading of his 1960 book, Nature and Man’s Fate, reveals that he was also a race-realist.

      • In 1960 the vast majority of white Americans were ardent immigration restrictionists and race realists. Then the education-propaganda complex got its meathooks into whitey and machined all of the wisdom out of his skull.

40. CFB was the only major sports event I watched until several years ago when I dropped it, as well. There were a number of reasons — the money, the willingness to overlook rule breaking by favored teams, domination by the SEC, players playing for scholarships worthless to the majority of them while making millions for coaches, universities and the ncaa, the complete disconnect between the teams and the universities they supposedly represent, — the usual reasons etc.

    It used to be the ncaa would at least pretend there was a relationship between the teams and the host colleges, they don’t even make that effort anymore. It’s a matter of who can recruit the best athletes, thugs or illiterates as they may be.

    The CFB situation seems oddly analogous to NASCAR, which I thought was entertaining when they raced basically stock family cars against each other. With each passing decade they got further and further away from that ideal. Now the cars are virtually unrecognizable.

    • It used to be the ncaa would at least pretend there was a relationship between the teams and the host colleges …

      If so, it long predates my time. I went to a big 10 school in the pre-cell phone era and even then college athletics was a big scam. The so-called “student” athletes were a bunch of meatheads and illiterates that were paid under the table in addition to receiving “scholarships” to attend. They were only required to go to a bunch of phony classes like “Learn Your ABCs” and “Counting to 10” and even then, half of them ended up incapable of even fulfilling that meager requirement.

      I think there’s also an argument to be made that college athletics programs actually lose money for the school. There’s a great deal of overhead to the programs that just gets put on the school’s book as general maitenance and upkeep and so on to make it appear that the sports programs are in the red. I’ve always felt that the whole thing was a horrendously corrupt scam. If the NFL and NBA want farm teams, they can run them themselves like MLB does instead of poisoning college campuses and socializing the cost of running the programs.

      • From what I’ve seen, an obscene amount of alumni donor money is predicated on having a decent sports team. In my alma mater donors spent 40 million on upgrading the football stadium.

        • At my undergrad school it’s not entirely uncommon for fat-cat alums to donate 10 mill or more to the athletic department for facilities upgrades. Of course, he who pays the piper expects to call the tune. I dare say the fat cats now have more functional power than the Athletic Director. And as Z is fond of concluding his pieces, this cannot end well.

        • High schools now are building facilities now that most colleges would have killed for a few years ago. I’m in a small town and it has an indoor practice facility for football, a new big gym and really nice baseball and softball fields. The football team isn’t very good except one a decade or so but you wouldn’t know it by the facilities.

          Traveling teams are a source of corruption especially AAU baskerball. The whole system is corrupt and gambling is endemic throughout.

          I would completely end athletics in all schools were it left to me. Even though I played, their influence is destroying education now.

      • There are about 2 dozen major college football programs that turn a profit. For the rest it is a money sink. But even at the ones where it is a money sink, there are still certain individuals involved who make bank.

    • The CFB situation seems oddly analogous to NASCAR, which I thought was entertaining when they raced basically stock family cars against each other. With each passing decade they got further and further away from that ideal. Now the cars are virtually unrecognizable.

      I’ll comment you’re on the right track (🙄) but there’s a better analogy here between NASCAR and College Football.

      I’ll just say at the start the evolution from “stock” (street) automobiles to racing specific chassis was inevitable. Street automobiles are not, and should not be, designed to be driven at speed on a racetrack. Different set of criteria for the engineers to meet. (A racing car for the street would be loud, obnoxious, and uncomfortable) Speed, safety, and durability drove the move away from strictly stock parts. Heck, in the old days of NASCAR them ol’ boys were already swapping in heavy duty truck parts like brakes, rear ends, springs, and other parts to strengthen the cars up.

      Thus endeth the technical piece.

      What I was thinking of was the pivot from the “man in the stands” being the focus to “Mo Money, Mo Money, MO MONEY!” via TV deals, dedicated TV channels, streaming, etc. In the old days before television found it a college football game or a NASCAR race was primarily for the fans in the stand first, and the listeners second (on the radio of course). A NASCAR fan would pack up his cooler with fried chicken, sandwiches, beer for himself, soda for the kids and the Missus, and head out to the track in his car or his truck, buy a ticket, watch the race and cheer for his driver, tailgate after it ended, and head on home.

      At first, television widened the viewing audience and attendance at events grew as people wanted to see what this thing was all about. It was still pretty blue collar (didn’t cost a king’s ransom to buy tickets) but it was a little harder now to get tickets for the more popular races/games and the prices started creeping up.

      Then everyone wanted more. In NASCAR’s case they wanted more races in more states across the US. One assumes in the NCAAs case they wanted more revenue and schools wanted bigger stadiums (Hello U of Michigan). So NASCAR builds these new race tracks across the US and starts dinking with tradition by pulling race dates from tracks (Brilliant move pulling the Southern 500, run on Labor Day at Darlington Speedway since 1950, and giving the date to a track in California. It’s since moved back). And the prices start moving up. A hotel room that cost $100/night? Yeah race weekend that’s $300/night. That $50 main straight ticket, yeah that’s $150, if you can find one. Free parking in the infield or around the track, yeah it’s $50 now.

      I recall calling the new Chicagoland Speedway ticket office in 2001 and inquiring about getting tickets for just the IndyCar race. Oh no, I was told, you need to buy a Track Pack of NASCAR and IndyCar tickets for four races.

      Oh so now you think you’re the NFL, huh? 😒

      Thing is, at some point the bubble busts. In NASCAR’s case they forgot the core fan, or just figured them dumb Bubbas (not Wallace) would shell out whatever we charge them ’cause them dumb chumps ‘ll buy what we’re selling. Whatta they gonna do? Har-har.

      Sit at home and watch the race on TV, or just find something else to do with their Sundays.

      Object lesson for the NCAA: That Chicagoland Speedway I referenced above: It’s sitting empty with no race dates since 2019. Rumor is it’ll be bulldozed and warehouses shall spring forth on it like mushrooms. By the time we left Silly-nois they were begging me to come to the race with four seats, a snack ticket, and a drink (non-alcoholic) ticket for $88 bucks.

      And this weekend is, well, what’s left of NASCAR’s Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis. Was once as hot a ticket as an Indianapolis 500 ticket. Now they don’t have a Brickyard 400, they race alongside IndyCar, and for $55/seat I can walk up Sunday, buy a seat at the ticket window, and plop my bottom anywhere I’d like to sit in the racetrack.

      And that’s something for the NCAA to think about. You’d better strip-mine the remaining Boomer’s and Gen-Xer’s for cash because with all the Indians, Chinese, and other foreign born students you’re attracting how long do you think you can milk this cash cow? Think the Indian kids in Computer Science or the Chinese kids in Engineering give two damns about State U football? From experience the Indians go crazy over Cricket matches in India, and goodness knows if the Chinese even care about sports.

      Them stadiums might have a lot of fans who went disguised as empty seats in the near future.

      /rant off.

      • There is no question that the corporatization of auto racing–and the idiotic decisions springing therefrom–have harmed the popularity of the sport. It’s a major factor, indeed. However, it is also beyond doubt that the elimination of danger has stripped away much of what made olde-tyme racing so fascinating–and no, I’m not saying everybody came to the tracks hoping to see somebody get killed. What I am saying is that people–men and women–want to see competitors do things that are far too difficult–and frightening–for them to do themselves. Your average Joe back in 1953 knew dam’ well he didn’t have the huevos or the skill to horse an Offy-powered beast of a fuel-bomb around Langhorn with 20 other daredevils all racing hell-for-leather to put food on the family table. But he revered like gods those men who did.

        Flash forward to 2023 and the parabola of intense human drama no longer exists in racing because, effectively, there is no danger, and the engineers are more important than the drivers.

        Corporatized, sanitized and euthanized.

        • No argument about the reduction of danger and the lack of innovation but I was responding Z’s point here:

          What people know is those traditions are important.

          The same people behind all of the other problems have been gnawing away at these traditions for the usual reasons. They look at our culture and wonder how they can turn it into a quick buck and then into something vulgar.

          I think of the Indianapolis 500, and the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime. Back when WW2 ended the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was in dire straits. Its owner, Eddie Rickenbacker, former Indy 500 driver, WW1 flying ace, and one of the founders of Eastern Airlines, wanted to sell the track and was willing to sell it to developers who wanted to tear the track down and build housing on it. Former Indy 500 driver and winner Wilbur Shaw worked with Anton “Tony” Hulman, a Terre Haute, IN businessman to buy IMS from Rickenbacker and save it from destruction. Hulman wanted the Indy 500 to be identified with Indiana the same way the Kentucky Derby is identified with Kentucky, a premier event known the world over.

          Shaw and Hulman brought the 500 back after all auto racing was suspended during WW2 and assembled a crew that worked their butts off to get the track ready for the first post-war Indy 500 for 1946. And they succeeded. And Tony Hulman worked to improve the Speedway, and the Indy 500, and started some of the traditions seen at the race (The playing of On The Banks of the Wabash as the cars are rolled on the track, the playing of Taps (It’s Memorial Day weekend after all), the singing of (Back Home Again in) Indiana before the start, the balloon release, and the command of GENTLEMEN Start Your Engines!). It was also the MONTH of May with two weekends of qualifying and then the 500. The pre-race traditions and festivities started and moved with military precision and you could set your watch to when the events would happen. And save for rain or an accident on track that green flag waved at 12 Noon.

          Now? Well I’ll keep it short and to the point. Tony died in 1977, the original “Split” between USAC (They sanctioned the 500 and open wheel racing) and CART (A coalition of car owners starting a rival league) happened in 1979, resolved itself by 1981, Tony Hulman’s grandson Tony George came into the picture in the early 1990s, a second “Split” between CART and Tony George’s IRL occurred in 1996 and resolved in 2008, and in 2019 IMS, IndyCar (successor to the IRL), and all intellectual properties were sold to Roger Penske, a wealthy and successful car owner and businessman. And suddenly the 500, which was more fan friendly, ain’t so fan friendly:
          – No more Fan Festival the Wednesday before the race which allowed fans to take a lap (30 MPH limit) of the Speedway in their street car before stopping in the infield and seeing the sights of the track
          – No more two weekends of qualifying
          – There used to be a big concert the Saturday before the 500 at IMS. Not any more
          – Parking in IMS lots was free and First Come, First Served. Now it’s $50 race day at the least
          – The Saturday before the 500 was the Driver’s Meeting, a racing memorabilia show, autograph sessions with former drivers and 500 winners, and a classic racing car festival. That’s gone, save for the Driver’s Meeting
          – The Indy Lights race on Carb Day, the last day of practice before the 500, which gave a chance to drivers working their way up to the 500 to race on the oval is gone
          – Decades long established traffic flows have been altered, making it a nightmare to get into and out of the track and parking, not to mention getting hassled by annoyed cops who “direct” (HA!) traffic
          – And that military precision on the traditions? Gone. Now TV dictates when things happen and there are long commercial breaks between events.
          – And in the final stupidity, Roger Penske gives the command and it’s “Drivers, start your engines” just like at any other race track in the US. It’s Indianapolis, we say Gentlemen or Lady(ies) and Gentlemen. We’re not Bugtussle Raceway in Gnaw Nuts, IN

          Roger wants to build a BMW “Experience” in the infield between turns 3 and 4. Which means a dealership. Nice touch.

          So you see, much like Kolluge Feetsball, some people look to monetize every little thing. Tradition? Bah! What’s tradition, there’s cash to be grabbed!

          I’ve been going to IMS since the 1980s. Not that I’m a little bitter or anything. 😏

          • Yes, it’s a dam’ shame alright. The ‘500’ ain’t what it used to be, although I still watch it on the boob toob religiously. But at least you can be grateful you’ve been able to attend so many ‘500’s. For those of us who’ve lived our whole lives over a thousand miles from Indy, attending the race is nothing more than a dream. If the opportunity presented itself, I’d be there in a heartbeat. And I’d spend an entire day in the IMS Museum.

        • Correlated: when all the players are millionaires, when the stars are making 10 or 20 million a year or more, then how badly does it really hurt to lose that game? Is the competitive fire in the 4th quarter the same as it used to be back when you had to be the best just to make enough money not to have a second job in the offseason?

          • The competitive spirit is not what it once was. Guys don’t take losses anywhere nearly as hard as they used to. Millions of dollars is a very effective salve. Moreover, individual accomplishments now trump those of the team. As long as LeB’oon scores 35 points and shows up Fur’Quanio’us in the process, he doesn’t really give a shit if his team loses. After all, he’s gunning for that fat new contract far more than a championship.

41. I went to a small D3 college. Football was something to watch on a nice day without investing any emotion in it if there was nothing better to do.

    Then I went to grad school at USC in the early 90s. The fanaticism of the fans was surprising to me, but it was fun in part because it was based on traditions. Followed the team and the Pac-10/12 after graduation but gradually lost interest.

    No the old rivalries are done, the coach and team are purchased free-agents playing for big money. It’s just the NFL minor league now. I’d rather watch the local high school team – and probably will since some of my neighbors have kids who play.

42. I’ve never watched CFB. (Was more of an NFL guy when I did watch sportsball.) When Mizzou entered the SEC years ago, local sportscuck radio went gaga of course, and then I heard about this guy named Paul Rosenbaum who hosted the most popular SEC call-in show.

    I wasn’t J*wpilled then, but it raised an eyebrow: a guy named Paul Rosenbaum hosting the premier radio show for SEC fans? Seems like that job should go to some sports goober from Alabammy?

    I’ve never listened to that show, but I’m curious if anyone has…has Rosenbaum applied his people’s subversions to the SEC community, or has he been a good old boy?

    • I assume you are talking about Paul Finebaum. From what I have seen his high profile is because he is on ESPN now. Don’t listen to his show but have never heard anyone say he doesn’t stick to what is happening in the sport.

      • Haha, I looked it up…it is Paul Finebaum.

        I got my Fines and Rosens crossed.

        • Alabama’s long time radio guy is a New York Jew named Eli Gold. He also has been a NASCAR radio guy. The locals don’t seem to mind he is very popular.

        • If you don’t mind your Steins and Bergs you may just get cancelled…

      • He has a no-nonsense analytical persona on the air. Not one of the ESPN personalities that starts diving into politics. He is very SEC-centric.

      • Finebaum is a complete and utter tool.

        Lived in Alabama when he was on the local sports talk radio there – where he got his start. Think Howard Stern meets Alabama college football talk. I was not aware of the JQ at the time, but could not stand him or his shtick.

        In retrospect, it was his quintessential Jooishness that rubbed me wrong…

        Lies, distortions, encouraging criminal behaviors. “Let’s you and him fight” was one of his favorite pastimes.

        If you really want to get a glimpse of Alabama college football madness, do a web search on the poisoning of the Auburn Live Oak trees at Toomer’s Corner.

        Finebaum was right in the middle of that debacle…

    • Paul Finebaum actually is a sports goober from Alabammy, or at least he’s been around forever. His physician wife pronounced my grandmother dead. Yes, I’ve listened to it, and I’m not even a sports fan.

      However, just read this morning that our state senator and former Auburn football coach doesn’t even live in Alabammy (as you put it), so your point is well taken.

    • I’ll tell you whut–the best dam’ BBQ in Allerbammy is Willy Wayne Finkelstein’s Down Home Southern Smoke Pit in Demopolis…

43. “Everyone pretends to be forever young so they never have to think about who will tend their grave.”
    The Derb has retold a Chinese proverb that makes a similar point from a different perspective. It involves a poor man struggling to provide for his family. When thigs get really bad he puts is decrepit father in a box, proceeds to a cliff edge, and prepares to dump the box and his father. Then father says, “Save the box. Your son will need it.”

44. The Northwestern Football “scandal” is simply an excuse to get rid of Fitzgerald, the former player, and until recently, head coach.

    Most, not all, of the players complaining about the team rituals were all joggers.

    Of course they were.

    Magic 8 ball says he is replaced by a magical knee grow.

    • Getting to the point where it’s almost impossible for a white man to coach nuggras. What that means is that white coaches will go the way of the dimetrodon, and in consequence, the quality of team sports will crater.

      Diversity is the natural enemy of merit.

      • Deion Sanders is going to accelerate that, because he is a member of the talented tenth, an astute student of the game, and will have great success wherever he coaches. Observing that, every big college program will say “we’ve gotta get us one of those,” but they will find the pickings to be slim. Some negro coaches will get stinking rich out of it though, as they lose lots of games. And it’s not as if there aren’t a bunch of white coaches getting stinking rich for losing a lot, so you can’t call it unfair.

        • I’m not sold on Sanders. There have been plenty of negro coaches who talk a great game–negro con men live off of that skill–but can’t coach a lick. Jackson State and the SWAC are one thing; the Big XII is something else altogether. I’m guessing he’s going to find the sledding pretty rough, and will ultimately wind up as a fairly successful DC at the Power Conference level.

45. I assume this will cover the NIL deals, now reaching into the seven figures. Also look up the Devin Millock/Chandler LeCroy saga, and UGA’s 25-yr old quarterback. Kirby Smart went out and bought himself a national championship team, complete with white whores excuse me, “recruiting analysts” for the lads to relax with. I assure you some alumni wrote pretty big checks to keep the lid on that auto accident.

    No white American should support college sports at this point. Pure social poison.

46. Anything run by men who do not expect to be around very long is never going to last.

    Maybe we should outlaw the corporation as a legal entity.

    • It used to be that we regulated them through the anti-monopoly laws. Unfortunately those have fallen to the wayside, and now their powers have grown so much that they can buy our leaders out of pocket change. Breaking them up would go along way to breaking up the tragedy of the commons cycle.

    • I’ve seen that case made persuasively several times, that it’s a legal fiction that someone is not in charge or has ultimate responsibility over how a business is run, and that an accounting gimmick masquerading as a person is corrosive to society. Or something like that I think.

    • Not the answer to the problem. While not it’s advertised selling point, the corporation was mostly a solution to some big players in the background who were effectively limited liability anyway while the schlubs in the foreground got the fines, prison time, even getting whacked. The corporation brought those dark people into the foreground.

      It would not be until the shell company game came into its own that the bad guys got their anonymous protection back.

    • My understanding is it used to be corporations had to be specially chartered by a legislature. This was back in the 19th century. For a long time we’ve had a registration system where even fast-food franchisers — really anyone — can incorporate.

      The only rationale for the corporation was for projects that were too big to be funded by private capital, railroads being the classic example, so they opened up the capital pool to the general public. It seems to me we should go back to the earlier system. But this is just one of numerous reforms that would be needed to right this sinking ship and it ain’t gonna happen. One can dream.

47. I stopped watching CFB years ago because it became so soulless and mercenary. The quality of the product has plummeted as this buck-chasing has become more ingrained. The much-vaunted college football playoff they set up is somehow worse than the BCS, the quality of the games are abominable and the traditional rivalries are long gone. Now they are planning to expand it, with even more bad matches, because it will make more money.

    Really though, this is the norm – it’s hard to think of any company putting out better products and offering more relative value to their customers than they used to. This makes sense, if you have a rapacious group of rent-seekers at the top extracting money from the company in exchange for nothing, the company will have less resources to actually carry out its defined functions and the people running the company have less incentivize to carry them out well.

    • I hear that. When I was a kid, Tom Wilkonson of the Edmonton Eskimos lived a couple doors down our street. Occasionally he’d throw a pigskin with us kids for a few minutes before going about his day.

      Today they are called the Edmonton Elks and the players are all noggers in dreadlocks that washed out of the NFL. You wouldn’t want your kids anywhere near these monkeys with their drugs, their grills and their hoes. The CFL is now a cultural wasteland as is much of Canada, sadly.

      • The last NFL game I attended was in 1986, but in 1999 a friend and I decided to head over the border and watch the Ti-Cats play the Blue Bombers. It was a blast. Ivor Wynne sat basically in the middle of a residential neighborhood, lots of people parking on lawns, crowds walking the last few blocks in ever-increasing groups. Outside the stadium a fund raiser table was selling boxes of macaroni and cheese for a looney each, which might be the most Canadian thing I’ve ever seen. The crowd was mostly white, friendly, with lots of people listening along on transistor radios, and Hamilton won the game by something like 52-35. That will surely be my last ever pro football experience but it was a fun way to go out.

        • Sigh. The old Canada was so pleasant.

          Today Hamilton is full of white junkies, hordes of Indian “students” clogging up every bus and sidewalk, spiced up by the occasional shooting from gangbangers who couldn’t make it in Toronto.

          But yeah, even back in 1999 it was a chill, mostly white, and family friendly blue collar place.

          • It’s not that bad. I still drive through to tend to mom’s house. Ivor Wynne is now Tim Horton’s Stadium or something and still in that old neighborhood. Lots of Ti-Cat flags flying from porches. On game days same old thing: people out with signs offering parking spaces and the crowds, pretty much all white, trekking happily toward the stadium.

            You are right though–lots of the old European-type working class stock has moved out. Replaced by lots of sketchy white trash types.

            Yet gentrification is underway. A couple of days ago driving along Canon I spotted the whitest looking student girl, tall and dressed all in black and dreamily touching the leaves of some shrub as she walked along. La la la. I thought: Girl, what on earth are YOU doing in this neighborhood?

            But it is in fact pretty safe in Hamilton. It just looks a lot rougher than it used to.

      • Used to see Bill Frank of the Bombers cutting his grass down the street..

      • Edmonton Eskimoes now called the Edmonton Elks. Heh heh. Well, of course they are.

      • I feel kind of sick watching guys smash their brains out for $70,000/year. At least the NFL players make millions for their troubles. The CFLers are screwed once they retire.

        CFL fans are mostly older blue collar white guys, and college students. Pretty relaxed and chill atmosphere at the games. Of course the league decided maybe 5-6 years ago that they were “falling behind” with their fan demographics.

        The new league slogan is “Diversity Is Strength” (why?) plastered everywhere and they just announced a new Indian language CFL broadcast.

        Another nice thing destroyed by wokeism I guess, although it seems like football is slowly dying off anyways.

        • The more obvious it becomes that diversity is doom, the more we will see the idiotic bromide that diversity is strength. They protest far too much.

48. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Tragedy Of Managerialism

49. I spent most of my career in Silicon Valley. Only fools like me tried to do what made the most business sense. Smart players did whatever was popular then, if it looked like it was going to result in disaster, they just changed companies before the SHTF.

    When I was working as a consultant in Asia, I spent a lot of time helping executives figure out how to deal with the craziness in the West. I came across a great article written by two organizational behaviorists called “Stupified: You don’t have to be stupid to work here but it helps.”

    https://aeon.co/essays/you-don-t-have-to-be-stupid-to-work-here-but-it-helps

    They found that companies like to pride themselves on hiring smart people, but those smart people are smart enough (unless they really hate stupidity like me) to realize that acting smart will destroy their career. Better to just jump on bandwagons.

    I would show this to Asian executives and the response was always “everything on the article happens in my company.”

    Like everything else, the problem is worse when you add Western Women executives into the mix. I consulted when I was still in the US to a female dominant company. Women would use 360 degree feedback to destroy the careers of any man who told them no. Men would agree to anything women wanted and wsit for the dreadful plan to fail and her to all for advice before being honest. Even the Chief Compliance Officer would support plans that would put the company out of compliance and cost the company millions so he wouldn’t lose his cushy job.

    Homer Simpson wisely told Bart that his second most important rule of life was “good idea boss!”

    • From your linked article.

      “One new recruit who faced this problem was Jack. After years at graduate school, he was a specialist in corporate governance.”

      The article overall is good, but I can’t help wondering in this particular example if years of ivory tower study in “corporate governance” really prepared him for the real world even if the company had welcomed the use of his intelligence and skills. Corporate governance is one of those notoriously vague areas where there are few hard and fast rules, and ideology often trumps pragmatism.

    • Thanks for those observations and the link. I spent most of my life in the academy, but your observations mirror my experiences in both academic and non-academic jobs. The people who run the place and get ahead are pure bullshit artists and trendy clique formers. If you are “dumb enough” to think critically and actually give honest input about real issues, you are finished, no matter how objectively correct you may be.

      On many occasions I have wondered how anything actually gets done in this country, no matter where you go it seems that your “job” is to comply with stupid bullshit and make the right social connections rather than actually produce anything or actually accomplish the task for which you were ostensibly hired. More than once I have observed that management everywhere seems to prefer incompetent lackeys and compliant fuck-ups over people who are actually competent.

      I know someone who is a physician. When the COVID hysteria hit, he was skeptical and refused to wear a mask unless he was in surgery. This made him a subject of whispering and sniping and he got hauled in before the CEO and the administration and told to wear a mask. He pulled out a mask in the factory packaging with a sticker on it that said “DOES NOT PROTECT AGAINST COVID-19” and showed it to the CEO.

      He was told “Wear it anyway.”

      • I have come to the conclusion that things get done in spite of most of the management. Every organization that survives seems to survive through:

        1 one or maybe two functions that are competent and carry the rest, or

        2 they are a monopoly or government org that is forced on the rabble, or

        3 their competition is even worse. I often think of the adage that the easiest way to improve your looks is to hang around ugly people

      • Should have worn a WWI gas mask just for shitz n’ giggles.

50. I don’t comment here much, if at all, but I must compliment you on “Managerialism is rule by a committee of people looking for a better job.”

    Not the whole truth but a palpable hit.

    • By golly you are in spanking form. “Ours is a society of visitors run by aliens.” Another hit.

    • The rather upsetting thing is that, at least as framed by Z (and I think it’s accurate), that this is yet another problem of modernity. What’s the solution? No stand-alone organization larger than 200 people? No “municipal unit” larger than 2000 people? Maybe there isn’t a solution except for a birth-death cycle where the managers are occasionally eliminated.

51. I don’t know beans from bullshit when it comes to college sports, thankfully. I have never watched and never cared.

    I would just like to say, props to Z-Man for living up to his masthead. The banner for this site still says “Sports, Culture, and Other Stuff,” but after several months of regular reading, this is the first I’ve ever seen about sports. I was wondering when that was going to make an appearance.

    • I always assumed that tagline was a deflection…

    • “Political science, philosophy and economics” would be more accurate. Not that I’m kvetching, mark you.

    • Thank you thank you for a non-sportsball comment! The only topic less interesting than electoral politics is feetsball.

52. No direct download?

53. I grew up with the Big 10, with Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State forming a nice regional rivalry. Usually one of the got the big trip out West to the Rose Bowl, usually to play USC or UCLA, exotic California teams that played among palm trees and balmy January weather. Next year it will be the Big 18, including the two California teams. Absurd. And no thanks.

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