Okay, so did you ever see OJ play football? Most people know he did. He played for the Buffalo Bills. He ended his career with the San Francisco 49ers. Many people never got to see him play. They missed out. No, this isn’t a ‘thing of beauty’ kind of piece, although it was. He played in an era when nobody was doing anything to protect the players. He played in an era when a guy running with the ball was taught to put his head down and smash into would-be tacklers if he could. (The tacklers were also putting their heads down and smashing.) You can still find plenty of video of OJ doing exactly that, head down – smash! Maybe you break the tackle and run free. There’s plenty of video of him doing that, too.

Do you know what CTE is? Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is brain damage football players get from doing what OJ (and everybody else back then) was taught to do. People thought they were safe because they were wearing helmets. As it happens, a helmet does nothing to keep your brain from rattling around in the brain pan after a hard impact. Do it over and over again and you’re likely to develop CTE. It can lead to early onset dementia, rage, depression, and eventual death.

It plagues retired players and, I suspect, some still playing. For many of them, their lives become nightmares. Junior Seau was one of the greatest in the game while he played. He had a well-deserved reputation as a hard hitter. CTE plagued his after-retirement years so badly, he killed himself so doctors could study his brain. He shot himself in the chest so his brain would remain intact. (CTE can only be confirmed postmortem.) You’ll hear story after story about retired players and the changes and decline in their personalities. In 2017, one of the largest studies conducted on the subject discovered that 110 of 111 deceased NFL players had CTE.

I’m ready to bet OJ will be found to have had severe CTE. He was a pretty rare bird. We watched him play. We watched his after retirement commercials. We watched his movies. Most of us liked him. Then, we watched his trial. He had allegedly brutally murdered his ex-wife and a friend of hers, though he was acquitted. Then, he participated in a petty heist trying to recover sports memorabilia and went to prison. OJ! We all, collectively, watched his decline, though we didn’t realize it at the time. We shook our heads. WTF?!?

I do not offer this thought to try to excuse OJ nor mitigate what he did. That can’t be done. But it does add yet another heartbreaking piece to an already tragic tale. Did Nicole die because, decades earlier, OJ was taught to put his head down and smash? Did CTE damage OJ’s ability to control his actions? It’s hard to say. American Football is a violent game, played by violent men. Mostly, though, they control themselves off the field. CTE interferes with that control, sometimes even causing the fury they can’t manage.

I doubt any of this would offer comfort to Ron Goldman’s family, nor to Nicole Brown Simpson’s family. They are still gone. Forever. But there might still be some small comfort in knowing that OJ’s actions may have been caused by brain damage and far beyond his control…

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Recently, my Facebook feed has been rather banal. There are an awful lot of stories about the Beatles and Star Trek and clips from third rate movies about taking on bullies. Not much more. I know that Facebook can, and does, manipulate it’s feed and it appears they are limiting posts from news outlets.

Then I read an article in the Guardian that says Google is manipulating search results to remove references to California news organizations. They’re doing so because California is working on a law requiring companies who use news stories to pay the news outlet that created the story. Google and Meta don’t want to pay so this is their retribution. Google wants to make sure we all know, they control what we see on their platforms. Commonly, they DON’T want us to realize they control the feed but it’s called a “feed” for a reason. You’ll get what they feed you.

This has always been true, to one degree or another. “Editorial decisions” have been used to control content going back, well, forever. Google and Facebook have already faced this battle in Canada and Australia. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, turned off their news feed in Canada during the recent wildfires. They still haven’t turned it back on. They’re still restricting news in Australia, too. In 2021, Australia passed a law similar to the one California is working on.

As it happens, I don’t think it’s a good idea to get one’s “news” from Facebook or Google. In my experience, when the companies aren’t restricting “news,” much of the information comes from ‘less-than’ sources, opinions dressed up as journalism. Many of us wanted them to control the constant barrage of bullshit that was coming from MAGA media. Now we’re not getting anything at all.

I suppose if my choice is misinformation mixed with journalism, I’d prefer nothing at all. But I’m curious to see what happens to those sites. I like Star Trek. I’m a fan of the Beatles. But I think there’s only so many stories one can read about either of them. What then? I suspect, less and less engagement with the sites. They may well be shooting themselves in the foot, being so blatant about how they control your information – and leaving us with…not much.

Long term, I think the pay to use laws will only work if they’re implemented everywhere. Both Meta and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, can absorb losing users in Canada and Australia for a while but if the law becomes widespread, they’ll have to change their stance or lose their most important asset, users. Meanwhile, MyBaconPress can just keep publishing since I don’t charge, anyway, and there will be less competition for eyes so…maybe not all bad, eh?