Quotulatiousness

January 15, 2014

Minnesota hires Mike Zimmer as their new head coach

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

It’s being widely reported (at least on Twitter) that the Minnesota Vikings have offered the head coaching position to Cincinnati Bengals defensive co-ordinator Mike Zimmer. Zimmer arrived in Minnesota yesterday for a second interview with Vikings executives and remained in town overnight. At the Daily Norseman, Arif Hasan put together a voluminous compendium of information on the head coaching candidates. Here’s part of the section on Mike Zimmer:

The former linebacker is also well-known for specific gameplanning, and pre-game adjustments to the scheme to match the weaknesses of the opponent, rather than relying on a base scheme. There are significant drawbacks to this approach (which is why the league-leading Seahawks defense prefers to stick with the scheme instead of changing much for specific game plans), but it has its adherents (Bill Belichick being the most famous — though defensive mavens like Rex Ryan do this as well. It is also the approach of Todd Bowles, the DC of the second-best defense in the league in Arizona).

The position that Zimmer prefers to be deepest seems to be cornerback, although he’s made sure the roster has had competition at a number of levels. Also interestingly, he has a tendency both to stick with and quickly move on from players. The best example of this odd paradox is Rey Maualuga, second-round pick for the Bengals in 2009. Rey was a solid-to-good strongside linebacker that did well for two years before switching to the middle.

[…]

Zimmer is probably best known for his hardnose, “no-nonsense” style of coaching that has endeared him to Bengals fans and seems to follow the tradition of Bill Parcells, berating players blue in order to get them fired up. Applied with intelligence, it also seems to have gotten the players’ loyalty. He’s even used it as an asset in his free agency recruiting, arguing that his ability to get results is better for players than what others can offer. It also means that players know where they stand with him, which can be invaluable.

Update: The Star Tribune confirms the news with this report by Mark Craig:

Mike Zimmer, a 20-year veteran NFL assistant coach who worked with Hall of Famer Bill Parcells in Dallas before turning the Cincinnati Bengals’ defense around as their defensive coordinator the past six seasons, has been hired as the ninth head coach in the Vikings’ 54-year history, NFL sources confirmed.

Zimmer, who has never been a head coach at any level, replaces Leslie Frazier, who was fired on Dec. 30, and becomes the third head coach hired since current owners Zygi and Mark Wilf bought the team in 2005.

Zimmer, 57, played quarterback and linebacker at Illinois State. He then coached on the defensive side at the collegiate level for 15 years at Missouri, Weber State and Washington State before joining the Dallas Cowboys as secondary coach.

He won a Super Bowl ring when the Cowboys beat the Steelers in Super Bowl XXX. One of Zimmer’s players, unheralded cornerback Larry Brown, became the game’s MVP.

[…]

Zimmer was praised by Parcells recently in a Star Tribune article.

“He’s very competitive, he’s intense,” Parcells said. “I think he’s a smart guy. … Every place that I’ve ever heard that he’s been, the players really liked him. And yet he doesn’t coddle the players at all. He’s got a good balance with that tough love.

“I think now he’s got enough experience to handle the players and the big picture and the scouting and the constraints and the things that the league mandates now. He’s got enough experience to where he’d do a good job.”

Bengals coach Marvin Lewis also has said Zimmer has what it takes to be a head coach.

“Zim does a great job of identifying who to push and when,” Lewis was quoted as saying on the Bengals website. “He helps me by being the guy who puts his foot up their butt, getting them moving in the right direction so I don’t have to be the one to do it all the time.”

Zimmer’s son, Adam, is a Bengals assistant coach. He also has two daughters Corri and Marki. Zimmer’s wife, Vicki, passed away suddenly of natural causes at age 50 in 2009. That same year, he was named NFL assistant coach of the year by cbssports.com and the Pro Football Writers Association.

President Obama’s speech shows his fear of “a backlash from national security agencies”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Is the national security “tail” wagging the national “dog”?

President Obama will issue new guidelines on Friday to curtail government surveillance, but will not embrace the most far-reaching proposals of his own advisers and will ask Congress to help decide some of the toughest issues, according to people briefed on his thinking.

Mr. Obama plans to increase limits on access to bulk telephone data, call for privacy safeguards for foreigners and propose the creation of a public advocate to represent privacy concerns at a secret intelligence court. But he will not endorse leaving bulk data in the custody of telecommunications firms, nor will he require court permission for all so-called national security letters seeking business records.

The emerging approach, described by current and former government officials who insisted on anonymity in advance of Mr. Obama’s widely anticipated speech, suggested a president trying to straddle a difficult line in hopes of placating foreign leaders and advocates of civil liberties without a backlash from national security agencies. The result seems to be a speech that leaves in place many current programs, but embraces the spirit of reform and keeps the door open to changes later.

Emphasis mine.

The NSA’s rise to being the “centerpiece of the entire intelligence system”

Filed under: Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

In Wired, Felix Salmon explains that “Quants don’t know everything”:

By now, nearly everyone from the president of the United States on down has admit­ted that the National Security Agency went too far. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the rogue NSA contractor who has since gained asylum in Rus­sia, paint a picture of an organization with access to seemingly every word typed or spoken on any electronic device, anywhere in the world. And when news of the NSA’s reach became public — as it was surely bound to do at some point — the entire US intelli­gence apparatus was thrust into what The New York Times recently called a “crisis of purpose and legitimacy.”

It was a crisis many years in the making. Over the course of three decades, the NSA slowly transformed itself from the nation’s junior spy agency to the centerpiece of the entire intelligence system. As the amount of data in the world doubled, and doubled again, and again, the NSA kept up with it — even as America’s human intelligence capability, as typified by old-fashioned CIA spies in the field, struggled to do anything useful with the unprecedented quantities of signals intelligence they had access to. Trained agency linguists capable of parsing massive quantities of Arabic- and Farsi-language intercepts don’t scale up nearly as easily as data centers do.

That, however, wasn’t the computer geeks’ problem. Once it was clear that the NSA could do something, it seemed inarguable that the agency should do it — even after the bounds of information overload (billions of records added to bulging databases every day) or basic decency (spying on allied heads of state, for example) had long since been surpassed. The value of every marginal gigabyte of high tech signals intelligence was, at least in theory, quantifiable. The downside — the inability to prioritize essential intelligence and act on it; the damage to America’s democratic legitimacy — was not. As a result, during the past couple of decades spycraft went from being a pursuit driven by human judgment calls to one driven by technical capability.

QotD: Early 20th century American imperialism

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC (1881–1940), War is a racket, 1935.

Top Gear – Car hit by train – Safety Message

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

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