the blazing dream of my head is crawling out

But

Meanwhile, according to a 2016 study on retired boxers, about 11% of all retired boxers examined had a mild case of CTE, and about 6% of the boxers had major neurological problems. And if you just looked at boxers who were over the age of 50 and fought in over 150 fights, the rate of CTE went up to 50%. (2)

I’m sorry, but it is absolutely reasonable for a boxing fan to say that American football should be illegal due to the injury risk, because American football is a much more dangerous sport than boxing in relation to the risk of traumatic brain injury.

And if you’re surprised to learn that American football is more dangerous than the sport where you literally punch each other. Well. I’d say that that’s part of the problem, actually.

(1) Mez J, Daneshvar DH, Kiernan PT, et al. (25 July 2017).

To be clear, I personally don’t think that it’s necessary to outright ban American football. There are a huge number of things that we could do to make the sport dramatically safer, short of just banning it altogether! But I think that part of the issue is precisely that people don’t know the relative risks of these things. Many fewer parents are comfortable letting their kids play the “hit each other in the head” sport than are comfortable letting their kids play American football, and that’s absolutely an issue of informed consent.

While it is overwhelmingly focused on the NFL, it does also get into how dangerous football is for young kids. Which they could research because they tragically have some kids die young for unrelated reasons and researchers got to look at these teens and 20 somethings brains. And they had signs of damage. Even in some people that had never had a concussion reported.

Basically its cumulative damage via deceleration... not just concussion. Kids that haven't gone through puberty yet are particularly susceptible to damage done *below* the threshold for a concussion because they haven't fully developed neck strength. So anything with a lot of sudden sharp deceleration via collision where they may effectively get whiplash (or just below diagnosable whiplash) is the culprit.

So it's not the time they got a concussion, it's doing repeated tackling drills with the sudden stop. The helmet doesn't help, because damage is due to brain moving inside skull due to the sudden stop. Helmet helps vs collision vs a secondary object but not just sudden stops.

Teens and adults are at lower risk because of greater muscle mass that can absorb more of the force safely, but still AT risk because when they DO tackle... they have a lot more mass which means a lot more force is involved. Its sheer physics. A little more resistant to the low speed collisions, but engaging in far more high speed, high force ones.

Which is also some of why football is more dangerous than boxing. You've got full body mass accelerating/decelerating.

Force = Mass X acceleration

a boxer isn't using his full mass or running speed, so even though its a direct head strike... its still got less force applied than quarterback getting plowed by a linebacker. And just by the nature of boxing, routine practice is not involving head strikes or rapid deceleration of the head with near the force of someone plowing into a tackling dummy.

Overall young kids shouldn't play tackle football. It's not necessarily a hit in game that's the risk, its repeated drills in practice that aren't done in a safe way. With insufficient rest in between. brains are really delicate and heal slowly from even minor trauma you can't see. teens & adults likely aren't getting near enough rest to recover either, especially for routine practice cumulative stress. There's techniques to make it safer but it's never really safe because of the cumulative nature of damage without time to fully heal in between.

Football is, unfortunately, often the only way some teens can get scholarships to try and get out of where they are... all while destroying the ability to benefit from same scholarship. Same kind of trap as military recruiting.

Wood engravings by Colin See-Paynton. ~ "Loons" ~ "Puffins" ~ "Tiding of Magpies"

Artist from Berriew, Powys, Wales. Born 1946.

Listed four Ancient Sea Creature Diorama prints in my Etsy shop!

*Please note* U.S. orders ship once a week on TUESDAYS due to limited access to a faraway drop-off location.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/OMB-2026-0034-0001

Here’s what I’ve got, modify how you like:

A ban that withholds funding from organizations that acknowledge trans people exist is not only a first amendment violation, it is a historical inaccuracy. Across time and across cultures, there have always been people who don’t fit into one of two boxes. Denying that trans people exist doesn’t make them not exist.

Nice to see other people reaching the same conclusions I did: