Quotulatiousness

December 4, 2012

An American view of Canada’s immigration policies

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:11

Shikha Dalmia says that the US could learn useful lessons on immigration policy from Canada:

… Canada’s provincial-nominee program is a model of economic enlightenment. Under this system, 13 provincial entities sponsor a total of 75,000 worker-based permanent residencies a year, and the federal government in Ottawa offers 55,000. Each province can pick whomever it wants for whatever reason—in effect, to use its quota, which is based on population, to write its own immigration policy.

Provinces may pick applicants left over from the federal program. They can also solicit their own applicants from anywhere in the world. In a direct attempt to poach talent from the U.S., some provinces are sponsoring H1-B holders stuck in the American labyrinth.

The government in Ottawa can’t question either the provinces’ criteria or their methods of recruitment. Its role is limited to conducting a security, criminal and health check on foreigners picked by the provinces, which has cut processing time for permanent residency to one or two years—compared with a decade or more in the U.S.

Richard Kurland, a lawyer who is considered Canada’s top immigration expert, notes that provinces use the program for diverse goals such as enhancing existing cultural or ethnic ties with other countries. Not surprisingly, the most popular reason is economic: to augment the local labor market.

The program gives British Columbia the same flexibility to sponsor, say, bricklayers as it gives Ontario to sponsor computer programmers. It doesn’t treat the entire Canadian economy as monolithic and pretend that distant federal bureaucrats can effectively cater to local job markets. (Canada’s federal program is a different story altogether.)

ITU approves Deep Packet Inspection requirement to enable government snooping of internet traffic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

The UN’s International Telecommunications Union continues its in-camera campaign to wrest control of the internet from all other organizations with a new policy designed to please intrusive and authoritarian governments worldwide:

The telecommunications standards arm of the U.N. has quietly endorsed the standardization of technologies that could give governments and companies the ability to sift through all of an Internet user’s traffic – including emails, banking transactions, and voice calls – without adequate privacy safeguards. The move suggests that some governments hope for a world where even encrypted communications may not be safe from prying eyes.

At the core of this development is the adoption of a proposed international standard that outlines requirements for a technology known as “Deep Packet Inspection” (DPI). As we’ve noted several times before, depending on how it is used, DPI has the potential to be extremely privacy-invasive, to defy user expectations, and to facilitate wiretapping.

[. . .]

The ITU-T DPI standard holds very little in reserve when it comes to privacy invasion. For example, the document optionally requires DPI systems to support inspection of encrypted traffic “in case of a local availability of the used encryption key(s).” It’s not entirely clear under what circumstances ISPs might have access to such keys, but in any event the very notion of decrypting the users’ traffic (quite possibly against their will) is antithetical to most norms, policies, and laws concerning privacy of communications. In discussing IPSec, an end-to-end encryption technology that obscures all traffic content, the document notes that “aspects related to application identification are for further study” – as if some future work may be dedicated to somehow breaking or circumventing IPSec.

Several global standards bodies, including the IETF and W3C, have launched initiatives to incorporate privacy considerations into their work. In fact, the IETF has long had a policy of not considering technical requirements for wiretapping in its work, taking the seemingly opposite approach to the ITU-T DPI document, as Germany pointed out in voicing its opposition to the ITU-T standard earlier this year. The ITU-T standard barely acknowledges that DPI has privacy implications, let alone does it provide a thorough analysis of how the potential privacy threats associated with the technology might be mitigated.

These aspects of the ITU-T Recommendation are troubling in light of calls from Russia and a number of Middle Eastern countries to make ITU-T Recommendations mandatory for Internet technology companies and network operators to build into their products. Mandatory standards are a bad idea even when they are well designed. Forcing the world’s technology companies to adopt standards developed in a body that fails to conduct rigorous privacy analysis could have dire global consequences for online trust and users’ rights.

Tumblr gets trolled

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

The Register‘s John Leyden on the JavaScript troubles inflicted on Tumblr the other day:

A worm spread like wildfire across Tumblr on Monday, defacing pages on the blogging website with an abusive message penned by a notorious trolling crew.

The outbreak was triggered by the GNAA, a group of anonymous troublemakers who get their kicks from winding up bloggers with offensive posts.

Tumblr temporarily halted the publication of new journal posts to prevent the worm from spreading further before restoring the service to normal a few hours later.

[. . .]

“It appears that the worm took advantage of Tumblr’s reblogging feature, meaning that anyone who was logged into Tumblr would automatically reblog the infectious post if they visited one of the offending pages,” wrote Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos.

“It shouldn’t have been possible for someone to post such malicious JavaScript into a Tumblr post — our assumption is that the attackers managed to skirt around Tumblr’s defences by disguising their code through Base 64 encoding and embedding it in a data URI,” he added.

UAVs move closer to the front rank of US Navy assets

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Strategy Page on the progress of the X-47B UAV:

The U.S. Navy X-47B UCAV (unmanned combat air vehicle) made its first catapult launch on November 29th, 22 months after its first flight. This launch was not from a carrier, but an airfield built to the same size as a carrier deck and equipped with a catapult. This first launch was to confirm that the X-47B could handle the stress of a catapult launch. Another X-47B has been loaded onto the deck of a carrier, to check out the ability of the UCAV to move around the deck. If all goes well, the first carrier launch of an X-47B will take place next year, along with carrier landings. Last year the navy tested its UCAV landing software, using a manned F-18 for the test, landing it on a carrier completely under software control.

It was four years ago that the navy rolled out the first X-47B, its first combat UAV. This compact aircraft has a wingspan of 20 meters (62 feet, and the outer 25 percent folds up to save space on the carrier). It carries a two ton payload and will be able to stay in the air for twelve hours. The U.S. is far ahead of other nations in UCAV development, and this is energizing activity in Russia, Europe and China to develop similar aircraft. It’s generally recognized that robotic combat aircraft are the future, even though many of the aviation commanders (all of them pilots) wish it were otherwise. Whoever gets there first (a UCAV that really works) will force everyone else to catch up, or end up the loser in their next war with someone equipped with UCAVs.

The U.S. Navy has done the math and realized that they need UCAVS on their carriers as soon as possible. The current plan is to get these aircraft into service six years from now. But there is an effort to get the unmanned carrier aircraft into service sooner than that. The math problem that triggered all this is the realization that American carriers had to get within 800 kilometers of their target before launching bomber aircraft. Potential enemies increasingly have aircraft and missiles with range greater than 800 kilometers. The navy already has a solution in development; the X-47B UCAS has a range of 2,500 kilometers

Is the USMC an unaffordable luxury for the 21st century?

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:52

In Time, Douglas Macgregor does his level best to persuade readers that the US Marine Corps is something the Obama administration could easily cut from the budget:

The Marines as currently organized and equipped are about as relevant as the Army’s horse cavalry in the 1930s and the Marines are not alone. They have company in the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps.

But, first, let’s examine the Marines.

In truth, the Marines have a low-end warfare niche, but a very small one for extremely limited and unusual types of operations.

[. . .]

The capability to come ashore where the enemy is not present, then, move quickly with sustainable combat power great distances over land to operational objectives in the interior, is essential. The Marines cannot do it in any strategic setting where the opponent is capable (neither can the XVIII Airborne Corps!).

The Marines cannot confront or defeat armored forces or heavy weapons in the hands of capable opponents. Nor can the Marines hold any contested battle space for more than a very short amount of time, after which the Marine raid or short stay ashore is completed.

Adding vertical-and/or-short-takeoff-landing (V/STOL) aircraft like the F-35B, to compensate for the lack of staying power and mobility on the ground is not an answer, particularly given the severe limitations of VSTOL aircraft, and the proliferation of tactical and operational air defense technology in places that count.

The real question is how much Marine Corps do Americans need? The answer is not the 200,000 Marines we have today.

December 3, 2012

Canada’s arch-traitor of the War of 1812

Filed under: Cancon, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

In the National Post, James Careless discusses the worst politician in Canadian history, the man who urged invaders to burn down his own constituency on their retreat:

Joseph Willcocks was an admired and effective member of the Upper Canada parliament for Niagara when the War of 1812 broke out. He quickly applied his skills to the war effort, convincing aboriginal warriors in his area to fight for the British. He earned the gratitude of the great British Army officer Sir Isaac Brock for his effort and fought alongside Brock at the Battle of Queenston Heights.

By all accounts he fought bravely. But as the war raged on, Willcocks decided to switched sides, joining the Americans who had overrun his Niagara riding. He created a turncoat regiment called the Canadian Volunteers who spied on Upper Canadians still loyal to the British, imprisoned their men and plundered their farms.

When the Americans retreated from Niagara in December 1813, Willcocks urged them to burn the village to the ground. This the Americans did, turning families out into the snow with the Canadian Volunteers’ eager assistance.

“This act of treason made Willcocks the only MP in history to burn his constituency,” says Sarah Maloney, managing director/curator of the Niagara Historical Society & Museum in Niagara-on-the-Lake (formerly Niagara). “His betrayal is unprecedented in our history.”

“Willcocks was certainly Canada’s worst-ever politician,” says Peter Macleod, pre-Confederation historian and curator of the Canadian War Museum’s 1812 exhibition. “But he was more than that. Willcocks was and still is Canada’s arch-traitor.”

Update, 24 May 2013: This was posted as a comment by Bryan Kerman, but comments are automatically closed on posted items after a few days, so it didn’t get added to the comment thread.

Sorry to surprise you but the article on Joseph Willcocks is misleading and covers up the big STATE LIE about him.

To whit:

1. He did not go willingly to the Americans but was run out by some prominent Tories, part of what would be called the Family Compact shortly afterwards.

2. He essentially fought his war within a war to hurt the Tories and otherwise political enemies who had caused him to flee.

3. His treason by taking up arms has provided convenient cover for 200 years to those who caused his expulsion and thence violent response.

These conclusions based on new evidence I have found is given in the ‘Introduction’ to my book Democrats and Other Traitors (Amazon) and throughout the novel.

Mr. Kerman’s book is listed on the Offorby Press website here.

The feudal technopeasant internet

Filed under: History, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:20

Bruce Schneier on the less-than-appealing state of user security in today’s internet:

It’s a feudal world out there.

Some of us have pledged our allegiance to Google: We have Gmail accounts, we use Google Calendar and Google Docs, and we have Android phones. Others have pledged allegiance to Apple: We have Macintosh laptops, iPhones, and iPads; and we let iCloud automatically synchronize and back up everything. Still others of us let Microsoft do it all. Or we buy our music and e-books from Amazon, which keeps records of what we own and allows downloading to a Kindle, computer, or phone. Some of us have pretty much abandoned e-mail altogether … for Facebook.

These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals. We might refuse to pledge allegiance to all of them — or to a particular one we don’t like. Or we can spread our allegiance around. But either way, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to not pledge allegiance to at least one of them.

Feudalism provides security. Classical medieval feudalism depended on overlapping, complex, hierarchical relationships. There were oaths and obligations: a series of rights and privileges. A critical aspect of this system was protection: vassals would pledge their allegiance to a lord, and in return, that lord would protect them from harm.

Of course, I’m romanticizing here; European history was never this simple, and the description is based on stories of that time, but that’s the general model.

And it’s this model that’s starting to permeate computer security today.

“Wookierotica” in Oz

Filed under: Australia, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

The Register is always willing to go the extra parsec to get the NSFW story. Here’s Simon Sharwood on a burlesque show with a Star Wars theme being performed in Australia this month:

The show’s creator says the performance doesn’t necessarily involve nudity, as he dislikes notions that burlesque always has to end up with a pile of smalls on the floor.

As the NSFW video below shows, the production will certainly leave you feeling rather more kindly disposed to storm troopers. You may also find out whether Jabba the Hutt bought Princess Leia just the one bikini.

The show is billed as a parody and is definitely not in canon. It’s also proving hard to suppress: since debuting late last year, it has enjoyed several seasons around Australia. A new run of shows kicks off in early December at Sydney’s Vanguard Theatre, just in time for Vulture South’s Christmas party.

We’re from the ITU and we’re here to “fix” your internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

At Techdirt, Nick Masnick recounts some of the wonderful things the International Telecommunications Union would like to “help” regarding that pesky “internet” thing:

We’ve been talking about the ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) for a while now, and it’s no longer “upcoming.” Earlier today, the week and a half session kicked off in Dubai with plenty of expected controversy. The US, the EU and now Australia have all come out strongly against the ITU’s efforts to undermine the existing internet setup to favor authoritarian countries or state-controlled (or formerly state-controlled) telcos who want money for internet things they had nothing to do with. The BBC article above has a pretty good rundown of some of the scarier proposals being pitched behind closed doors at WCIT. Having the US, EU and Australia against these things is good, but the ITU works on a one-vote-per-country system, and plenty of other countries see this as a way to exert more control over the internet, in part to divert funds from elsewhere into their own coffers.

Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the ITU, keeps trying to claim that this is all about increasing internet access, but that’s difficult to square with reality:

    “The brutal truth is that the internet remains largely [the] rich world’s privilege, ” said Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, ahead of the meeting.

    “ITU wants to change that.”

Of course, internet access has already been spreading to the far corners of the planet without any “help” from the ITU. Over two billion people are already online, representing about a third of the planet. And, yes, spreading that access further is a good goal, but the ITU is not the player to do it. The reason that the internet has been so successful and has already spread as far as it has, as fast as it has, is that it hasn’t been controlled by a bureaucratic government body in which only other governments could vote. Instead, it was built as an open interoperable system that anyone could help build out. It was built in a bottom up manner, mainly by engineers, not bureaucrats. Changing that now makes very little sense.

Canada is also on the record as being against the expansion of the ITU’s role.

Canada will look to prevent governments from taking more power over the Internet when governments sit down for 12 days of negotiations on the future of the Internet next week, but the government didn’t say Thursday where it stands on a contentious proposal that could see users pay more for online content.

Canada’s position going into the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) mirrors a number of Western allies in opposing having governments control how the Internet functions, leaving it to the current mix of public and private sector actors, according to documents released to Postmedia News under access to information laws. That stance is in contrast to proposals from some of the 193 members of the International Telecommunications Union, such as Russia, that want greater control over the Internet — more so than they already have in some cases — including more powers to track user identities online.

The meeting in Dubai will determine whether the ITU, an arm of the United Nations, will receive broad regulatory powers to set rules of road in cyberspace. The potential to centralize control over the Internet into the hands of governments has some users and hacktivists concerned that freedoms online would be crushed should a new binding international treaty change the status quo for how telecommunications companies interact across borders.

Vikings manage only brief moments of offensive effectiveness, lose in Green Bay 23-14

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Green Bay was playing hurt, showing vulnerabilities, and shaky on both offense and defence. Minnesota had Adrian Peterson the cyborg running back going over 200 yards on the ground, but no passing attack at all. During the TV broadcast, even Troy Aikman and Joe Buck were making comments about Christian Ponder having nobody to throw the ball to (nobody open, that is). The first completion to a wide receiver came with less than three minutes remaining in the game. If this continues, the Vikings will have to spend several picks in the 2013 draft on wide receivers…

Dan Zinski at The Viking Age:

What’s the recipe for losing a game when your running back goes for 210 and a touchdown? Measure out a generous amount of bad quarterback play, mix in some terrible third down defense, add a dash of stupid penalties and stir. That was about how it went for the Vikings today. They had a shot at Lambeau Field, thanks mostly to Adrian Peterson, but they blew it. They blew it because Christian Ponder threw two unspeakably awful interceptions. They blew it because the D couldn’t get off the field on third down to save its life. They blew it because they didn’t play with enough discipline.

At the top of the list of culprits today was Christian Ponder. Even his most hardcore defenders have to admit this. He played a miserable game. The interception he threw in the end zone was just about the worst decision you can imagine. Can’t pass that one off on the playcalling or the receivers or the pass protection. That was all on Ponder. It was a throw that never should’ve been made. A second interception later was almost as bad. He just did not look like an NFL quarterback today, outside of one drive in the first half where he led them down for a TD. For most of the game he looked lost. Calls for his benching have been getting louder with each passing week but now they’ve become a roar. But of course the Vikes won’t bench him because they have no one else. Joe Webb is not going to lead this team into the playoffs.

The not-so-hidden Agenda 21

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

In the Libertarian Enterprise, John Walker talks about the UN’s Agenda 21:

In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (“Earth Summit”) in Rio de Janeiro, an action plan for “sustainable development” titled “Agenda 21” was adopted. It has since been endorsed by the governments of 178 countries, including the United States, where it was signed by president George H. W. Bush (not being a formal treaty, it was not submitted to the Senate for ratification). An organisation called Local Governments for Sustainability currently has more than 1200 member towns, cities, and counties in 70 countries, including more than 500 in the United States signed on to the program. Whenever you hear a politician talking about environmental “sustainability” or the “precautionary principle”, it’s a good bet the ideas they’re promoting can be traced back to Agenda 21 or its progenitors.

When you read the U.N. Agenda 21 document (which I highly encourage you to do—it is very likely your own national government has endorsed it), it comes across as the usual gassy international bureaucratese you expect from a U.N. commission, but if you read between the lines and project the goals and mechanisms advocated to their logical conclusions, the implications are very great indeed. What is envisioned is nothing less than the extinction of the developed world and the roll-back of the entire project of the enlightenment. While speaking of the lofty goal of lifting the standard of living of developing nations to that of the developed world in a manner that does not damage the environment, it is an inevitable consequence of the report’s assumption of finite resources and an environment already stressed beyond the point of sustainability that the inevitable outcome of achieving “equity” will be a global levelling of the standard of living to one well below the present-day mean, necessitating a catastrophic decrease in the quality of life in developed nations, which will almost certainly eliminate their ability to invest in the research and technological development which have been the engine of human advancement since the Renaissance. The implications of this are so dire that somebody ought to write a dystopian novel about the ultimate consequences of heading down this road.

December 2, 2012

USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, decommissioned

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

The USS Enterprise was taken out of service yesterday after a long career:

The world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was retired from active service on Saturday, temporarily reducing the number of carriers in the U.S. fleet to 10 until 2015.

The USS Enterprise ended its notable 51-year career during a ceremony at its home port at Naval Station Norfolk, where thousands of former crew members, shipbuilders and their families lined a pier to bid farewell to one of the most decorated ships in the Navy.

“It’ll be a special memory. I’ve missed the Enterprise since every day I walked off of it,” said Kirk McDonnell, a former interior communications electrician aboard the ship from 1983 to 1987 who now lives in Highmore, S.D.

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link. He also reported that the Secretary of the Navy announced that the third Ford class carrier will be called Enterprise.

Is UKIP about to become a mainstream British party?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:53

After the strong showing in the Rotherham by-election, the UK Independence Party is on the verge of becoming mainstream:

The steady rise of the party originally known as the United Kingdom Independence Party has spanned a decade, taking in a second place at the 2009 European Parliament elections and extending into its remarkable performances in three parliamentary by-elections on Thursday. Ukip is now widely predicted to win the next European elections in 2014.

“Our previous best-ever by-election result, a fortnight ago, was 14.3 per cent and this one is comfortably over 20 per cent,” Ukip’s oddly charismatic leader Nigel Farage declared on Friday. “The political establishment is just going to have to wake up to the fact that Ukip is here and here to stay as a significant and rising mainstream part of British politics.”

Ukip is still far from winning a parliamentary seat, but its most recent achievements are acknowledged with some concern by the three main parties. Mr Farage’s claim that he is now leading the “third force in British politics” might be a little overexcited, but after Thursday, the Liberal Democrats have been put on notice that they are in mortal danger, as their traditional ability to vacuum up protest votes is challenged. Senior Conservatives are openly debating an electoral pact with a party David Cameron once dismissed as a bunch of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, in an effort to neutralise the electoral damage Ukip could wreak on the Tory Eurosceptic vote. Mr Farage is demanding a place on the podium at the leaders’ debates during the next general election.

It is a far cry from the early days, when Ukip — founded from the Anti-Federalist League by the academic Alan Sked to campaign for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union and dominated by middle-class males of a certain age — struggled to cast off its oddball reputation. In its first venture into parliamentary campaigning, at four by-elections in June 1994, its candidates — including Mr Farage — won a total of 2,324 votes. Mr Sked claimed they would win “six or seven” seats at the 1997 general election, but their 193 candidates garnered only 0.3 per cent of the national vote between them.

GamingBolt.com interviews ArenaNet’s Colin Johanson

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:41

George Reith of GamingBolt.com talked to the director of Guild Wars 2, Colin Johanson:

With Guild Wars 2, the initial reception was pretty stellar, with some great sales figures and a pretty high Metacritic average. How did you feel about that? Are you happy with how the game is performing?

I’m thrilled. To be honest, I think the predictions of how we thought the game would do, at each step along the way, it always was bigger, and more popular than we had ever expected it could be. And it’s been really humbling, honestly. Every step of the way, there’s been more people that showed up for all our betas and more people who signed up to play it on day 1 and more people who purchased the game so far since it came out than any of the numbers we expected. Our last big November weekend — at the high point in the weekend, we were using about 90% of our total server bandwidth for the demand of all the players logging in. And that was just awesome to see. It’s not something that we necessarily expected to be quite so big and we’re continuing to grow. And it’s just really humbling and really exciting to see how much people are falling in love with the game over a short period of time.

Do you have any kind of regrets regarding the development? I mean, obviously you can’t have that many regrets because, well, you’ve released a pretty good game. But if there anything, personally, that you think you would differently if you got the chance to do it again?

You know, there’s always the time element. We spent five years on the game and that’s a really long time to spend on any project. In the game industry, that is eons to be working on anything. You know, the game came out, and I play it everyday, and I everyday I see something in it. There’s always the little detail that sticks out to me- ‘Oh, we could have done that better!’ If we just had one more fix we could make, to make it more spectacular. There’s always a little detail that stands out to me, something we could have done if we had a little more time. But you know, honestly, we could sit on it for ten years and we could keep working on it, never put it out, and we probably still wouldn’t be happy. [Laughs] So it’s hard to say.

At the end of the day, I think that we’ve done a really good job, getting a really solid game out the door. There are certainly some areas that we know we need to grow in, and add more features. PvP is a big one for me. We know that there are some features that we need to have to get the PvP up to where we want it to be. Those were not included in release, and those are all things that we have either already added since the game came out or we have a team of people building right now. So it’s one of the big ones for me, really, growing that competitive PvP feature-base.

Despair not Vikings fans, says Jim Souhan

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:05

At the Star Tribune, Jim Souhan says that the fans are already witnessing a vastly improved and attitudinally changed team:

I’ve covered the Minnesota Vikings on and off since 1990. For much of that time, the team has underachieved and sometimes simply choked while wearing a snarl on its collective face. Those who spent copious time in the locker room were right to think of a 41-0 loss in the NFC Championship Game as a function of karma.

This year’s team is different. This year’s team is the most likeable set of overachievers to wear purple since 1992, when Tony Dungy was just starting to try to prove he could be an NFL defensive coordinator.

So why do so many Vikings fans view this season the way economists view the Fiscal Cliff?

“You’re right, the people around you can sometimes drain the energy, and make you feel like things are worse than they are,” coach Leslie Frazier said.

With the Vikings at 6-5 and heading to Green Bay for a renewal of the best rivalry in Minnesota sports, Minnesota fans should feel they’re playing with house money instead of holding losing lottery tickets.

Before we get to perception, let’s give full weight to the key fact of any NFL season: the team’s record. The Vikings being 6-5 means they’ve already met or surpassed rational expectations for victories in a year dedicated to developing young talent. They are contending for the playoffs one year after finishing 3-13 and while testing a young quarterback, their star player’s reconstructed knee, a new defensive coordinator, a revamped offensive line and a host of young players.

This season the franchise seems to be edging toward competence with a rational plan and a generally admirable cast of competitors. They have lost only to playoff contenders, the weakest of which, Washington, is 5-6 and features the league’s most dynamic player in quarterback Robert Griffin III. They have beaten San Francisco, perhaps the team with the strongest top-to-bottom roster in the NFL. They have swept Detroit, a team loaded with talent that went 10-6 and made the playoffs last year.

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