Keep in mind as you read the news today… most of the disasters and problems and all being reported have fairly simple solutions.
The fact that none of those solutions are implemented is the actual news of each day.
Good luck.
@nytimes@TheAthletic The only thing truly problematic about America is the number of self-hating dipshits who refuse to appreciate its greatness.
Also, GFY 🇺🇸
James Lindsay was right about you being a bunch of useful idiots to Communists and Islamists if you turned against Israel in the last two years as a conservative.
Remember, while Paxton fights for you there is a coven of Republicans fighting against Paxton. Example- Mark McCaig and Hunter Bonner, two profound losers.
@JohnRHuffman This is stupid. If you need your ass kissed to help you decide how to vote, it might be better for you and everyone else if you decided to consider a new way to choose your candidate.
The Sorsby stuff has been "taked" to death but here is mine after sitting in it for a few days. Barring a change on the legal side, he will be a member of the team in the fall. That's not up to TTU. If he is on the team, he will likely (per contract) earn his full revenue share/NIL money. TTU has no choice in that matter either.
The only question then for Texas Tech, is if he plays or if he sits on the bench and earns a paycheck.
So what the rest of the country is asking Texas Tech to do, is to pay him to practice, to be on the team, and not play football. This, they say, will protect the integrity of the game.
But what did he do that supposedly compromised the integrity of the game in the first place? He placed bets...from the bench.
So what we're really talking about isn't protecting game integrity in 2026 at all. We're talking about punishment. Punishing Sorsby for 2022.
Punishing Sorsby by paying him $5 million to not play. That's not much of a punishment if you ask me.
When you tear away all the bluster and moralizing, what they are really asking is for Texas Tech - and Texas Tech alone - to be punished.
Not Sorsby, not Indiana where it happened, not Cincinnati who played him after. Texas Tech alone.
The rest of college football would love nothing more, and would be laughing the entire time.
Our program should evaluate his mental and physical fitness, and his compliance with the order put in place. We should make sure that, all else being equal, he is our best option before going out on that field. Maybe he is, maybe he isn't.
But we should not let bullying, threats, and emotion (from those who already wished us harm) to have any bearing on that decision whatsoever.
Strip it all away and they are really asking for Texas Tech to be the only party in this scandal to be punished. The only party who, by any objective measure, has done absolutely nothing wrong.
Do that, and the outrage from the peanut gallery will not turn to adulation, or even silence. It will turn to mockery.
The more I look at this lighthearted monument idea. the more I think it accidentally captured the entire story of the Global War on Terror.
Not the war itself, but what it became.
A giant restraint stretched across open ground, another buckle fastened by people convinced that every problem can be solved by tightening the strap one more notch.
Those of us who fought that war were not fragile. We crossed oceans, climbed mountains, walked through cities filled with bombs, and carried burdens that would break most people. Yet somewhere along the way an entire generation of leaders became convinced that the greatest threat to those men was not the enemy, but risk itself.
What followed was twenty years of wrapping warriors in procedures, approvals, permissions, reviews, assessments, oversight mechanisms, and legal opinions until the institution slowly forgot the difference between protecting a force and restraining it.
Every buckle arrived with good intentions. Every layer was justified. Every restriction was sold to us as profound wisdom. Nobody noticed that the accumulation of caution was producing its own form of recklessness. We became so obsessed with preventing small failures that we lost the ability to achieve great successes.
That is the lesson staring back at me from this seemingly funny image.
Civilizations are not preserved by eliminating danger. They are preserved by producing men capable of confronting it. A people that spends enough time worshipping safety eventually begins treating courage like a pathology and initiative like a threat. The instinct for survival remains, but it becomes detached from the willingness to act.
History has never been kind to societies that make that trade.
What makes this monument joke so powerful is that it unintentionally captures the hangover of an entire era. An era spent tightening straps while the muscles beneath them slowly atrophied. An era spent managing risk while forgetting that the greatest risks are often the ones created by excessive caution.
If the Global War on Terror means anything, it should be this: never again confuse bureaucracy for strategy, process for progress, or restraint for strength.
The buckle is perfect.
Not because it honors what we were.
Because it reminds us what we became.
And it reminds us what we should never be again.
Cautious to the point of calamity.