The Daily Cannibal

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Armstrong Is Us Posted: 16 Jan 2013 04:20 AM PST Bigger, faster, and stronger is the way forward for sports. We want our stadiums to be bigger, our live video streaming to be faster, and our teams to be stronger. How is an athlete to keep up with such pressing demands? They cheat. Of course they do. Sports are big box office with power agents, entourages and real big money contracts. The pressure couldn’t be greater for the athletes. The competition is stiff and unforgiving. The diets, strength training, and former secrets of the trade, once kept on lockdown in the depths of franchise locker rooms, are now simply a quick Google search away. The drugs are no longer the secrets, but rather how to get away with using them. Why not?  It’s wow that we want, not wimps. I want my athletes to have robotic chips, bionic arms, and if they have a life expectancy of 40 years, hey, that’s not my problem. Because sports is entertainment and that is what I demand. Suggesting that an athlete cannot take performance enhancing drugs is the equivalent of telling a porn actor they can't have body-enhancing supplements or procedures. Let the audience decide – just follow the money. If given the choice to watch football with athletes that abide by the rules versus a league where athletes can pump themselves up with as much juice and synthetic crap they need to give them a step-up from the competition, the latter would surely win, with Budweiser and Pepsi waving the flag high and wide. Or simply look to fact:  Olympic wrestling has a difficult enough time raising enough funds just too get to the Games, but WWE has a half billion market cap. So maybe Lance was onto something. No matter what, though, the message remains the same: never be too early, and the moment more than one person knows the secret, everybody knows it.  Armstrong’s biggest mistake was thinking he could keep his drug use a secret forever. We made Lance Armstrong.  All this hypocritical cant is just that — cant.  We know what we want.  And we know what it takes to get it. Wrestlers pumped up on steroids riding bicycles up the Alpe d’Huez?  Now that I'd watch on pay-per-view.

Promises, Promises Posted: 15 Jan 2013 09:16 PM PST Remember when Obama went to New Jersey after hurricane Sandy and promised homeowners that he’d make sure they could rebuild ASAP “with no red tape?” Something else happened.  From “This Metamorphosis Will Require A Permit,” by Roger Kimball, a Wall Street Journal reporter, who describes his firsthand experience: Every [FEMA agent] we’ve encountered has been polite and oozing with sympathy. Even the lady who reduced my wife to tears was nice. The issue was my wife’s proof of income. We sent our tax return to FEMA, but that wasn’t good enough. They wanted pay stubs. My wife works as a freelance writer and editor. She doesn’t get a pay stub. Which apparently makes her a nonperson to this government agency. In “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek noted that “the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.” Kimball’s story is one of teh most powerful and illuminating examples of how good intentions combined with an all-powerful bureaucracy accountable to no one creates a living hell:  …what makes the phenomenon so insidious is that many of the functionaries are as friendly as can be. It’s just that they’re cogs in a machine whose overriding purpose is not service but self-perpetuation and control. It is, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw, a recipe for a form of despotism peculiar to modern democracies. It does this, wrote Tocqueville, by enforcing “a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules” that reduces citizens “to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” The sobering thought is that we’re all complicit in that infantilization. After all, we keep voting for the politicians who put this leviathan in place. We never seem to learn that, whatever the intent of much  government intervention and regulation, that intent is almost never achieved.  All that is accomplished is the further constraint of the freedom of the individual to act effectively and responsibly.  When those who have no stake in an outcome wrest control from those that do, the outcome itself suffers and suffers mightily. Thanks again to Doug for forwarding this.

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