Nobody really expected the Vikings to go undefeated in 2016, but the loss last week to Philadelphia was supposed to be the exception, not the blueprint for following weeks. On Monday night, the Vikings looked like a struggling 1-5 team, not a 5-1 team that was briefly the last undefeated team in the NFL. There were a few good individual performances, but overall the team looked flat and uninvolved. The offensive line was its usual hot-mess self, demonstrating an inability to pass block (allowing five sacks and a multitude of hits on Sam Bradford) or run block, but perhaps the most shocking development was the ineffectiveness of the defensive line. The defensive line has been the bedrock strength of the team this year and they just didn’t get pressure on Jay Cutler. The best run defense in the league gave up nearly their average yards per game on a single early run by rookie running back Jordan Howard.
November 1, 2016
Vikings drop embarrassing game to the Chicago Bears, 20-10
New Inventions And New Fronts – Fall 1916 I THE GREAT WAR WW1 Summary Part 6
Published on Oct 31, 2016
1916 is known as the year of battles and in the past three months you could see that there was still no end in sight. Romania joined the war opening another front and at the Somme and at Verdun the battles were still raging.
November is financial literacy month … please stop pestering us with well-meaning financial advice
Frances Woolley says the various government attempts to cajole us into being more economically minded are mostly a waste of time and effort:
November is financial literacy month. Canadians are being advised: Start with a budget. It is about as effective as declaring National Fat Shaming month, and advising Canadians: Start with a diet. Saving money, like losing weight, requires fundamental lifestyle changes. But it is hard for anyone to change the way that they live.
Take, for example, one of the standard pieces of financial advice: Give up that morning latte, and other frivolous habits, and soon you’ll have saved enough for a down payment on a new home. As someone who works at a university, I have some sympathy for those who rail against millennials with their lattes. Here am I, bringing my coffee from home in a Thermos, and I see students who are less affluent than me sipping fancy drinks from Starbucks. What would it take for them to do what I do?
To begin with, it would take time: an extra 10 or 15 minutes in the morning. Second, it would take capital: a kitchen with a coffee machine and space to store stuff. Third, it would take know-how: coffee brewing skills. Finally, it would take self-discipline: to go to bed early, and get up in time to make coffee at home.
Financial literacy education tries to remove that last obstacle, self-discipline, by lecturing people about the virtues of managing money and debt wisely. But, for the most part, it does not work. As Carleton University economist Saul Schwartz, puts it: “Financial education might have some positive effects on financial outcomes, but they are modest at best.” People are simply not very good at exercising self-restraint. When consumers have tap-enabled credit cards that make purchases painless, it is hard to resist the temptation to spend.
The weirdness that is the year 2016
From Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “newsletter”:
This has been a weird year. But, frankly, things have been getting weird for a while now. For a few years, I’ve increasingly felt like someone was ransacking the conventional-wisdom warehouse and throwing away the old standards.
The D&D geek in me likes to imagine there’s some Gothic keep out there with a grand library full of jars containing the Unwritten Rules of the Universe, each filled with some kind of pixie or will-o-the-wisp free-floating within. Alas, a couple of precocious kids broke in, climbed up the sliding library ladder along the shelves, and then smashed each ancient jar on the floor. The ephemeral creatures within flew away, and took their rules with them.
The sci-fi geek in me imagines that maybe the code of the universal computer has been hacked or corrupted and so the dedicated and automated programs of daily life are weirdly misfiring. You laugh now, but let’s see how funny you think this is when Kim Kardashian cracks the formula for cold fusion or water starts boiling at 200 degrees.
[…]
As a Chestertonian at heart, I like and respect old things. I like it when stuff beats the law of averages for reasons we cannot easily fathom. The Hayekian in me thinks old things that last often do so for good reasons we just don’t — and sometimes can’t — know.
Unfortunately, we live in an age where we take the razor of reason to every little thing and strain to know the whys of it, as if knowing the why will empower the how.
For example, we know that kids raised in stable two-parent, religiously observant families will on average do better than kids who are not. This holds true despite differences in race, class, and religion. We all have theories for why this is so — but too many people think that if we can just isolate the variables, we can take the good bits and discard the husks we don’t like.
An even worse — and more prevalent — mindset is to not even bother with the why. If we can’t immediately grasp why some old practice, some ancient tradition, some venerable custom or Chestertonian fence is worthwhile, we tend to instantly dismiss it as outdated and old-fashioned.
But again, as Chesterton and Hayek alike understood, simply because something is “old-fashioned” doesn’t mean it wasn’t fashioned in the first place. And by fashioned, I mean manufactured and constructed. Customs are created because they solve problems. But they get less respect in our present age because they have no identifiable authors. They are crowd-sourced, to borrow a modern phrase for an ancient phenomenon. The customs and institutions we take for granted are crammed full of embedded knowledge every bit as much as prices are. But most intelligent people are comfortable admitting they can’t know all the factors that go into a price, but we constantly want to dissect the whys of every custom.
QotD: The goose-poop war
Canada geese have settled on the National Mall, and Canada geese, in the proud Canadian tradition of Tom Green and Celine Dion, spew excrement everywhere they go — up to three pounds per day per goose. (Celine Dion presented the scientific world with an interesting technical challenge: How to measure excrement in decibels.) Apparently, Canada is either still miffed about that unpleasantness in 1812 or — and this seems more likely — enraged about the acquisition of Tim Horton’s by Burger King.
Ergo, biologically engineered avian crap-bombs from Canada descend upon Washington.
Go ahead and draw up that treason indictment: I am siding with the enemy on this one.
If there is to be a plague of goose poop befouling an American city, it really could not happen to a more fitting municipality than our hideous national capital, and especially to the gallery of architectural malpractice and monumental grotesquery that is the National Mall, that eternal testament to the unfinished work of Major General Robert Ross, who had the good taste to put Washington to the torch but who tragically failed to salt the earth on his way out. General Ross later helped to establish what would become a proud American tradition: getting shot to death in Baltimore. His body was pickled in rum before being returned to Nova Scotia, an excellent end to a life well-lived.
Kevin D. Williamson, “Old threat: ISIS; new threat: geese”, National Review, 2015-03-29.
