Quotulatiousness

September 12, 2016

Vikings beat Titans 25-16 with defensive take-aways, but no running game to speak of

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sunday’s game was cover-your-eyes awful in the first half (for Vikings fans — check my Twitter feed for examples), but the second half more than made up for the flaws in the opening 30 minutes. With the quarterback decision un-announced until game time, everyone including the Titans’ defensive co-ordinator was expecting the Vikings to be nothing but the Adrian Peterson show, starring Adrian Peterson. And that what the Vikings tried to do during the first half, with distressingly poor results (19 carries for only 31 yards). Whether it was issues with the run blocking or Peterson’s sudden hesitancy to attack the hole (or both), the Titans kept him firmly under control.

Tennessee opened the scoring with a first quarter field goal and made the vaunted Vikings defensive line look … ordinary.

At best.

Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota was barely ruffled by the pass rush and seemed to have plenty of time when he chose to throw the ball or to keep it and run, while the Titans’ two new running backs were moving the ball very well on the ground. When the Vikings weren’t giving up chunks of yards, they still managed to find opportunities to commit infractions to give away more yards in penalties. While the endzone was still elusive, the Titans were able to move the ball pretty much at will all through the first half.

The Fox game announcers seemed to have Vikings linebacker Chad Greenway (no. 52) on the brain because they credited him with tackles on a couple of occasions that were clearly Harrison Smith (no. 22) … if only because Chad can’t move that fast any more. (I love and respect Chad Greenway, but he’s not the player he was and I hope for his sake this is his final season in pads. If he wants to go into coaching, I’d love to see him continue as part of the Vikings organization.)

Vikings kicker Blair Walsh had an awful-then-mediocre day. The awful started with a missed field goal from 37 yards, then followed up with another terrible miss from 56 yards and a missed extra point later in the game. <sarc>Other than that, though, he did okay.</sarc> This is how bad the first half looked:

Coach Zimmer seems to have gotten through to the team, because the second half was a very different story indeed, starting from the kickoff where Cordarrelle Patterson took the ball 61 yards to set up the first successful kick for Blair Walsh, finally getting the Vikings onto the scoreboard. After a second Walsh field goal, middle linebacker Eric Kendriks picked off Mariota’s pass and ran it in for the Vikings’ first touchdown of the game (but Walsh didn’t convert). Walsh made his next attempt, moving the score to 15-10, and then a fumble was scooped up by defensive end Danielle Hunter and run in for the score. Walsh made his final field goal attempt and the game was almost out of reach for the Titans at 25-10.

Harrison Smith picked off Mariotta to seal the game, but Everson Griffin was penalized for roughing the passer (well after the ball was out), and instead the Titans were deep in Vikings territory with a first down. DeMarco Murray caught the touchdown pass, but the two-point try failed, and the Vikings covered the onside kick to snuff out the Titans’ last chance to tie the game.

(more…)

The impossible choice facing American voters in November

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tamara Keel wraps it up nicely:

Democrats seem baffled that their candidate isn’t galloping away with this thing.

So, my Democrat friends, you know how you’re all “Jesus, how could the Republicans pick someone so incredibly loathsome? Are they stupid?” Pretty much that right back at you.

Just like the Republican primaries managed to select the only candidate who could possibly get beaten by the Lizard Queen from Zeta Reticuli, your unDemocratic Superdelegate Logrolling Festival managed to turn up the one candidate in your party who might lose to Cheeto Jesus.

Both major parties are, ironically, in a place where the best thing that could happen to their electoral chances is for the headliner on their ticket to suffer a sudden heart attack.

QotD: Turning regrets into “rape”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Today, it is not uncommon for rape charges to be brought in respect of foolish or stupid sexual encounters. After presiding over back-to-back trials where a female complainant had been so drunk she could not remember what had happened and, therefore, whether she had consented to sex, Judge Mary Jane Mowat observed that “the rape conviction statistics will not improve until women stop getting so drunk”.

It was significant that Judge Mowat prefaced her comments by noting she would “be pilloried for saying” them. She may have had in mind the treatment of Ken Clarke MP, who, in 2011, referred to “serious rape”. This prompted Labour leader Ed Miliband to call for Clarke’s resignation on the grounds he was suggesting “there are other categories of rape”. Clarke spent the rest of the day saying he “always believed that all rape is extremely serious” and he was “sorry” if his comments had given any other impression.

Despite the censorious you-can’t-say-that attitude of some feminists, there is an urgent need, not to debate the seriousness of rape, but to debate what rape is. Rape, properly defined, is serious. But by redefining rape to encompass drunken or foolish sexual activity, which a man believes the woman is consenting to, the crime of rape is, in these instances, being stripped of its criminal culpability.

“Impossible”, claim rape campaigners with a glib understanding of how rape is now defined. Labour MP Harriet Harman responded to Sarah Vine’s column with an all-too-familiar analogy: “If I leave a window open an inch and someone breaks in, steals everything I own and ransacks my house, no one would say it wasn’t a crime or that the offender had ‘made a mistake’.”

Yet there is no parallel between a burglar who trespasses into a house and steals, and a man who believes a woman is consenting to sex. Trespass followed by theft is inherently unlawful. Sex, though, is inherently lawful, which is why it requires a carefully drawn law before it is criminalised. Traditionally, a conviction for rape could only be secured if the prosecution proved beyond reasonable doubt that the man either knew the woman was not consenting to sex or he could not care less whether she was consenting (Morgan, 1975). It was this mental element of the offence (mens rea, as lawyers call it) that ensured that only defendants with an appropriately guilty mind could be convicted of rape.

Jon Holbrook, “New rape laws: turning sex into a crime”, spiked!, 2015-02-12.

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