Today endless columns will be packed with punditry about last night’s excellent Super Bowl. And why not? It was a damn good game. Reasons advanced for the stunning victory of Saints will be more numerous than hungover fans on Bourbon Street. But, saturated with statistics, there is one fundamental truth that most of the journalists will miss. Confronted with possibly the best quarterback ever to play the game, one Peyton Manning, Saints coach Sean Payton did something too seldom seen in the game of professional football these days. He took risks.
He went for a touchdown on fourth down. Fail.
But it sent a message to the team -”I believe you can do this.”
And then; while the geriatric zombies formerly known as The Who adjusted their catheters and taped their urine bags to their legs long enough to wail a couple of once-familiar tunes that sounded like ring tones, all the while surrounded by enough pyrotechnics to end the war in Afghanistan overnight; back in the fetid locker room Sean Payton laid out his audacious plan for an onside kick.
And it worked, and it kept Peyton Manning warming the bench for an ungodly amount of time. The Colts went down because Manning could not take the field for long enough to do what he does better than anyone else, march off the yards and put points on the board.
Sean Payton took risks. He gambled. He slew the mammoth. He fed the tribe.
Message to all the pencil-necked scum-sucking, bottom-dwelling, over-reaching do-gooders out there who are putting helmets on little kids, and seat belts on toilets as you read this. MAN NEEDS RISK: not an overweening, seemingly benevolent Federal nanny. Go somewhere else and die! Slowly, so you have time to beg forgiveness for your arrogant sins!
remain at the controls were the American public paying attention. But the public is not paying attention – they have been distracted by Real Virtuality. 
I try to resist the temptation to suspicion that statists are driving towards a unified command and control economy. I do not think that this agenda is the basis for formal discussions, except perhaps tangentially in the hallways of Davos. There is an impetus to power, and more power, that can create the same effect in groups of men without the need for formal discussions. Financial engineers and bankers will alway seek more control and more power, because they are seeking to master something that is a portion of human nature, that does not lend itself easily to linear manipulation. As their plans fail, they need to keep expanding to prevent a collapse and their personal humilitation. This is inherent in what they do. This is how dictatorships are created; they seem to be the easier path to inability, if not incompetency.
eleven. After some debate, the old man broke down and bought a set two weeks before broadcasting started. For two weeks my siblings and I sat enthralled night after night watching the Indian. 
We look forward to the Super Bowl, a two hour game which will take four and a half hours to play out, interposed with endless beer commercials and fluff pieces on the community service efforts of newly minted centimillionaires with African names and diamond earrings. Soon we will get the Hollywood Hand Jobs; the Golden Globes, The Grammies, all culminating in that el supremo jerkfest: the Academy Awards. 
the kenverine
would look at Haiti and think, “You know what? It was a great idea to put 10 million people on half of an island. The place is routinely battered by hurricanes (in 2008, $900 million was lost/spent on recovery from them), it holds the aforementioned title of poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, and it happens to sit on a tectonic fault line.”