College football has always meant more to me than the final score. It carries memories of Saturdays with my father, Navy playing Air Force in Colorado Springs, regional rivalries, marching bands and traditions inherited across generations. My father once enlivened a college performance of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” by transposing the famous piccolo solo for his sousaphone. Whether that stunt or his grades eventually ended his collegiate band career remains part of the family mythology.

That is the college football I still love. Unfortunately, I am no longer certain it is the college football we are watching.

Oklahoma opened its season by beating UTEP 51–0. Next comes Michigan at the Big House, a game filled with history, uncertainty and genuine consequence. After that, Oklahoma plays New Mexico. At some point, we should stop pretending these mismatches are serious contests and admit that major programs are purchasing glorified scrimmages from schools that need the money.

The problems run much deeper than scheduling. NIL was sold as an opportunity for athletes to profit from autographs, endorsements and their public identities. It has instead transformed recruiting into an auction and the transfer portal into free agency. Major universities now operate professional football teams without the contracts, salary controls or roster stability that govern actual professional leagues.

Meanwhile, the institutions supporting college sports are facing their own reckoning. Tuition is soaring, enrollment is declining, public confidence is weakening and some colleges are consuming reserves merely to maintain their existing staffs and facilities. Wealthy football powers such as Oklahoma and Notre Dame will survive. Smaller universities may not. Their football programs depend upon student fees, institutional subsidies, local donors and payments received for playing games they are expected to lose.

College football is becoming extraordinarily wealthy at the top while the educational structure beneath it grows increasingly fragile. I will still watch Oklahoma play Michigan, and I will care deeply who wins. But somewhere between the multimillion-dollar rosters and the purchased blowouts, the sport must decide whether the word “college” still means anything.

#CollegeFootball #NIL #NCAA #OklahomaFootball #PlausiblyLive #TheDaveBowmanShow

The Thought Police Are Watching the Taproom

There was once a useful boundary between public conduct and private conviction. You could buy bread, order coffee, or enjoy a pint without first demanding a political confession from the person behind the counter. That boundary is rapidly disappearing, particularly when activists can search public records, identify a business owner’s political contributions, and organize economic punishment without pausing to consider what the person actually supported.

Today’s Plausibly Live begins at a Tacoma brewery whose owners contributed to a Washington ballot initiative campaign. Their money was specifically intended to help repeal the state’s capital gains tax, but political nuance proved inconvenient once activists discovered that the organization also supported another initiative involving transgender participation in women’s sports. The resulting controversy raises a question extending far beyond beer, taxes, or any single ballot measure: Can citizens still petition their government without placing their livelihoods before a self-appointed tribunal?

From there, the show heads to Thailand, where two sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln managed to turn an ordinary night of liberty into an international headline. The official account describes a “drunken brawl.” Anyone who has served aboard ship may recognize something considerably less extraordinary: young sailors, a foreign port, an argument, and shore patrol arriving before matters became genuinely memorable. Dave draws upon his own Navy experience to explain how quickly “us versus them” can change after somebody insults the ship.

Finally, a conversation about Dolly Parton, Whitney Houston, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas wanders into dangerous cultural territory: tattoos. One lyric from the film has remained lodged in Dave’s memory for decades, and he is prepared to defend its wisdom despite knowing perfectly well what the response will be.

Political surveillance, sailors ashore, craft beer, Dolly Parton, and an opinion almost guaranteed to generate angry email. It is exactly the sort of Friday journey one should expect from The Dave Bowman Show.

#PlausiblyLive #DaveBowmanShow #FreeSpeech #PoliticalCulture #USNavy #DollyParton #Podcast

Congress has managed to discover socialism. This might seem encouraging until you remember that the national debt has reached $40 trillion, the federal government still lacks a genuine budget, and lawmakers apparently have plenty of time for nonbinding resolutions designed to produce campaign advertisements.

House Resolution 1490 was presented as a condemnation of socialism. It could not create a law, reduce spending, reform an agency, or change the life of a single American. What it could do was force members of Congress to cast a politically useful vote. Republicans could declare themselves defenders of capitalism. Democrats could either oppose the resolution and be accused of supporting socialism, or vote for it and advertise their supposed independence from the party.

That brings us to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the Democratic representative from Washington’s closely divided Third Congressional District. Her vote for the resolution has been celebrated as evidence of moderation and independence. Perhaps it was. Then again, principles that emerge shortly before a difficult election deserve closer inspection. Was she exercising the judgment Edmund Burke believed a representative owed the people, or mailing campaign literature through the House voting board?

This episode of Plausibly Live examines the difference between representation and pandering. If a congressional vote carries no legal force and produces no policy consequence, what exactly are taxpayers purchasing? While Congress performs ideological theater, the debt climbs, budgets remain unfinished, and the difficult work of governing waits patiently outside the chamber.

From there, Dave ventures into the darker corners of public irrationality, online discourse, and the peculiar humor people develop when ordinary language no longer seems adequate. It is an episode about politics as performance, social media as a carnival of certainty, and the increasingly strange ways Americans persuade themselves that uncomfortable realities need not be real.

After all, Congress did condemn socialism. Surely that fixes everything.

#DownWithSocialism #Congress #PoliticalPandering #NationalDebt #GovernmentSpending #ElectionYearPolitics #PlausiblyLive #DaveBowmanShow

Washington has always been skilled at confusing an announcement with an accomplishment. President Trump’s new Venezuelan oil agreement sounds impressive: American control over billions of barrels, lower gasoline prices, and new supplies for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Then reality intrudes. Venezuelan crude resembles tar more than Texas oil, thecountry’s infrastructure is collapsing, and its government has a long history of confiscating foreign investments. A press release cannot repair pipelines, restore the electrical grid, or manufacture the rule of law.

Government confidence becomes more troubling when it turnsfrom controlling oil to controlling information. Samuel Tunick returned from the Dominican Republic carrying a cellphone that federal agents wanted to search. He gave them a duress code that erased the device. Now he faces a felony charge for destroying property to prevent a lawful seizure.

That word, “lawful,” carries nearly the entire case.

The federal government possesses broad authority at theborder, and deliberately wiping a phone after agents seize it can look remarkably like shredding documents while investigators stand at the door. Yet a modern cellphone is not ordinary luggage. It can reveal years of correspondence, medical information, financial records, movements, associations, and political beliefs. The constitutional protections attached to that digital life may currently depend upon whether your airplane lands in Atlanta, Boston, or Seattle.

Then there is the Lindsey Clancy trial, or more precisely, what the public reaction to it reveals. The arguments spreading across social media have moved far beyond one defendant, one tragedy, or one disputed psychiatric condition. They have become arguments about women, voting, abortion, mental illness, tyranny, and whether American society remains capable of rational judgment.

This episode of Plausibly Live considers what happens when complicated realities encounter institutions and citizens desperate for easy certainty. Oil cannot be governed by press release. Privacy cannot depend entirely upon geography. Human tragedy cannot be understood through slogans,hashtags, or the most unhinged opinions offered by strangers at two in the morning.

#PlausiblyLive #DaveBowmanShow #FourthAmendment #DigitalPrivacy #BorderSearches #CellphonePrivacy #VenezuelanOil #GovernmentPower #ConstitutionalRights #CivilLiberties

Government loves a list. It loves categories, identification numbers, demographic boxes, databases and tracking systems, each created with assurances that the information will be used responsibly and only for its stated purpose. Sometimes those systems genuinely improve accountability. Sometimes they reveal that the government has developed a remarkable ability to count things it cannot competently manage.

In this episode of Plausibly Live: The Dave Bowman Show, Dave begins with a proposed federal system for tracking mail-ballot envelopes. The barcode would not record how a person voted, but it would connect a named voter with an individually numbered envelope moving through the postal system. That distinction preserves the formal secret ballot, provided election officials permanently separate the identifying envelope from the enclosed vote. It does not settle the larger questions of privacy, presidential authority or what happens when a hurried computer system decides that a lawful ballot does not match its records.

California offers another version of the same dilemma. A new bill would allow Jewish residents to identify their ancestry or ethnicity on state demographic forms. Supporters see long-overdue recognition of Jewish peoplehood and a means of documenting discrimination. Many Jews see something else: a government asking who is Jewish and promising that the resulting information will never become a registry. California is not reenacting the Nuremberg Laws, but Jewish history explains why official assurances cannot erase every suspicion.

Meanwhile, the Navy can count every submarine in the fleet while maintenance delays have cost more than 15,000 operational days. Utilities can count hundreds of gigawatts requested by proposed data centers, even when many of those projects may never exist.

Across elections, ethnicity, national defense and electric power, the central question remains the same: What does the government actually know, what can it competently do, and how much trust should it receive merely because it promises that everything is under control?

Radio has been dying for so long that one might wonder whether anyone has bothered to notify the corpse. The towers still stand. The signals still hum through the air. Millions of people still turn it on every day, often without making a decision to do so. Yet something has changed, and it happened long before the dashboard began filling up with podcasts, satellite channels, and streaming apps.

For most of its history, radio possessed an advantage that had little to do with the quality of its programming: scarcity. A listener could choose among whatever stations happened to reach the car, kitchen, or bedside table. Familiarity became habit, habit looked like loyalty, and broadcasters came to believe that the audience belonged to them. Then technology handed that audience the keys to the building.

Corporate consolidation is usually cast as the villain in this story, and it certainly deserves a place in the lineup. Local voices disappeared. Playlists and programs were centralized. Experienced personalities became expenses to be trimmed. Dave witnessed that transformation from behind the microphone, where “less Dave, more Sean” passed for strategic wisdom and one of his most popular features was canceled because it was not what corporate radio did.

But greed alone did not kill the old order. The deeper change was economic. Listeners gained choices, and those choices became effortless. The station now competes with every podcast, livestream, audiobook, archived program, and specialized voice in the world.

This episode asks what is actually dying when we speak of the death of radio. Perhaps it is not the intimate human connection that made the medium powerful. Perhaps it is merely the tower’s control over that connection. The radio star did not disappear. He slipped past the gatekeeper, took the audience with him, and found another microphone.

#DeathOfRadio #RadioHistory #Podcasting #TalkRadio #Broadcasting #MediaEvolution #DaveBowmanShow

Canada renamed streets, universities, and landmarks while insisting that history was not being erased. Then Trump called Lake Ontario “Lake America,” and suddenly historical names became sacred.

Dave examines Canada’s curious double standard.

#Canada #LakeAmerica #CanadianPolitics #PlausiblyLive

Polls tell us who's ahead. Until they don't.

Pollsters sample voters, weight responses, model turnout, account for undecideds, and then confidently tell us what Election Day is going to look like.

There's just one problem: Election Day hasn't happened yet.

There is only one poll that actually matters. It's the one where people show up, cast their ballots, and we count the votes.

Everything before that is a prediction.

Here’s the Thing.

#HeresTheThing #Polling #Elections #Politics #PoliticalPolling