“A long, long time ago,” as Don McLean might begin singing this post, sports, the games and its participants, were where a young American sprout could find role models, innocent fun, and reliable ethics values. “Those were the days,” Mary Hopkin would warble back.

Item: Judge Claudia Wilken ultimate approval for the House v. NCAA settlement last night. approved the landmark, multi-billion dollar settlement of three separate antitrust cases against the NCAA and its conferences. Universities that opt into the settlement terms will be able to pay athletes directly through a revenue-sharing pool starting July 1, capped at roughly $20.5 million in 2025, the first year of the structure. About $2.8 billion will be set aside as back-pay damages for former college athletes athletes dating back to 2016 who did not have the opportunity to get compensated for their name, image and likeness Oh yeah, this will work out well. Didn’t colleges once exist for the purpose of educating all of its students rather than as big time sports money machines? You know, when sports were innocent entertainment and avocations, built character and social skills, student athletes weren’t employees, and college teams weren’t primarily the minor league systems for billion dollar professional sports leagues?

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Oh gee, I don’t know: because it’s stupid? Because it was inevitable? Because the news media is trying to pump it up to make Trump look bad, when what the reaction to the tiff really does is make them as well as the Democrats cheering for Musk look far, far worse?

I put the old reliable cognitive dissonance scale up right away to save time. The President of the United States is almost always higher on the scale than whoever his critics are. This was less true for Trump than most Presidents in his first term, but not Trump II.

Americans generally defer to their Presidents and support them when they are being criticized. The Trump Deranged, who are essentially mentally ill, are a special case, but they were Musk-Deranged too, because he was seen as an ally of Trump. So they burned his cars, and pretended he was a Nazi. They demonized him, and now they think they can suddenly flip-flop on Musk without looking like the foolish hypocrites we all know they are?

All the so-called “feud” proves is that Musk’s ego has no bounds, and his neurodivergence occasionally eats his brain. Trump gave him added power, prestige and influence: he’s throwing it away. Trump, meanwhile, is playing this exactly right. Musk is in negative territory on the scale: the more he attacks the President, the lower he falls and Trump rises. The more Democrats suddenly embrace Musk, who was supposedly a Nazi, the cruel killer of children and the poor in third world nations, the mean job-cutter and a chainsaw budget monster, the worse they look. Trump will get credit for what DOGE did under Musk, and Musk looks like a turncoat and whiner to turn on his patron.

Let him start his own party based on the “unsustainable debt.” That worked out so well for Ross Perot, who was weird, but not nearly as weird as Musk. What Perot’s crusade proved is that nothing will make Americans care about the unsustainable debt, and it is unsustainable, until it crashes the economy, which it will. The parties are handing a time bomb back and forth hoping that they aren’t the one holding the thing when it blows up. The debt will keep growing, because we will never, never, start paying the principle down. We should, but we won’t. Controlling the deficit just means that the debt becomes more unsustainable more slowly.

Yay.

Shut up and make your cars and rockets, Elon. This isn’t helping.

Democrats successfully forced Elon Musk to abandon DOGE before originally planned by vandalizing his company’s cars, attacking dealerships, intimidating Tesla owners current and potential, and causing Musk’s business interests to suffer major financial losses.

Thoughts:

1. It is too much to ask for me to criticize Musk for reacting as he has to these attacks encouraged by Democratic officials and others. However, by quitting Musk validated an illegal and unethical strategy, one that will only get more extreme and violent now, I believe.

2. This is one more reason why I believe Trump’s pardoning the J-6 assholes was justifiable, though I would not have issued the sweeping pardons he did. The hypocrisy and excessive prosecutorial zeal of Biden’s Justice Department was palpable: the J-6 rioters were targeted as much for who they supported as for the laws they broke.

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I just answered a reasonable question from a commenter on this post, who asked, “I have some questions about the unethical nature of James O’Keefe’s “journalism.”I would say his methods are ugly, but sometimes ugly things are discovered in ugly ways. Anybody who happily uses the results of his “journalism” enables this type of journalism; condemning this type of journalism sounds hypocritical to me after using his results.”

The comment continued, “Personally I have fewer inhibitions than you on his style; perhaps that is because of a different appreciation of Machiavelli. Sometimes the end does justify the means; it all depends on the end and on the means. Also James O’Keefe (above, before he was fired by his own organization) is not an official journalist, and may therefore not feel bound by any ethics code for journalist he has not signed, and therefore feels free to act as a free agent.”

After I posted my reply, I realized that I had just written a post, and one that was necessary despite the fact that I have written on this topic (and related ones) often here. This is what I wrote, lightly edited:

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