Quotulatiousness

December 21, 2015

Vikings beat the Chicago Bears 38-17 to go to 9-5 season record

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Due to mundane concerns (starting to organize the household for a move), I didn’t get to watch the first half of Sunday’s game between the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears, but I got enough worries from the text messages as the first half wound down … with running back Adrian Peterson leaving the game during the first half with a leg injury, among other scary updates). This meant that an offensive plan built around Peterson would have to be re-tooled on the fly to work to the strengths of second-year quarterback Teddy Bridgewater. I’m on record as believing in Bridgewater as Minnesota’s quarterback of the future, but it wasn’t clear whether the current personnel grouping would allow Teddy to carry the team in the absence of Peterson. I probably shouldn’t have worried about it, as Teddy put in his first career five touchdown game (four passing, one rushing, with no interceptions).

1500ESPN‘s Judd Zulgad, not known as a Bridgewater fanatic, put it quite well:

Three weeks ago, there was growing concern among Vikings fans that Teddy Bridgewater might not be this team’s quarterback of the future. On Sunday, that same quarterback had to call a timeout in the fourth quarter because the crowd at TCF Bank Stadium was chanting his name so loudly and wouldn’t keep quiet.

This is why it’s never a good idea to attempt to write off a second-year quarterback based on a bad game, or even a series of subpar performances.

Bridgewater probably isn’t as good as the guy who completed 17 of 20 passes for 231 yards with a career-high four touchdowns and no interceptions in the Vikings’ 38-17 victory over Chicago, and he certainly isn’t as bad as the guy who hit on only 17 of 28 passes for 118 yards with no touchdowns and an interception in a 38-7 loss to Seattle two weeks ago in the same stadium.

In what he acknowledged was the best game of his pro career, Bridgewater accounted for five touchdowns, including a 12-yard dart into the end zone during which he got spun in the air, and had a 154.4 passer rating. That rating is the second-best all-time for a Vikings QB in a single game, second to the 157.2 rating Gus Frerotte posted in a 35-7 victory over San Francisco on Sept. 28, 2003. A perfect passer rating is 158.3.

“These past two weeks I’ve seen a different look in his eyes,” Vikings running back Adrian Peterson said of Bridgewater.

Peterson wouldn’t be the only one who has noticed his quarterback has responded impressively since a poor performance against the Seahawks in which no element of the offense performed up to expectations.

(more…)

When the political pressure overwhelms the operational priorities

Filed under: Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Strategy Page on the political win of just requiring the US Marine Corps and Special Operations Command to integrate their front-line troops (integrate women into their front-line units, that is):

In early December, after years of trying to justify allowing women into the infantry, artillery and armor and special operations forces, the U.S. government simply ordered the military to make it happen and do so without degrading the capabilities of these units. While the army was inclined the just say yes, find out what quotas the politicians wanted and go through the motions, some others refused to play along. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and the marines pointed out that the research does not support the political demands and that actually implementing the quotas could get people killed while degrading the effectiveness of the units with women. This is yet another reason why many politicians do not like the marines and are uneasy about SOCOM. The commander of SOCOM promptly said the order would be implemented (otherwise he can kiss his upcoming promotion goodbye) but the Marine Corps has, as in the past, not voiced any enthusiasm at all. This decision involves about 220,000 jobs. About ten percent of these are special operations personnel, commonly known as commandos.

The special operations troops are not happy with this decision. In a recent survey most (85 percent) of the operators (commandos, SEALs, Rangers) in SOCOM opposed allowing women in. Most (88 percent) feared that standards would be lowered in order to make it possible for some women to quality. Most (82 percent) believed that women did not have the physical strength to do what was required. About half (53 percent) would not trust women placed in their unit. For these men the decision is a matter of life and death and SOCOM commanders fear that the decision, if implemented, would cause many of the most experienced operators to leave and dissuade many potential recruits from joining. Keeping experienced personnel and finding suitable new recruits has always been a major problem for SOCOM and this will make it worse.

That said there are some jobs SOCOM operators do that women can handle. One is espionage, an area that SOCOM has been increasingly active in since the 1990s because of their familiarity with foreign cultures and operator skills and discipline. Another task women excel at is teaching. Israel has long recognized this and some of their best combat skills instructors are women. But what the male operators are complaining about is women performing the jobs that still depend on exceptional physical as well as mental skills. These include direct action (raids, ambushes and such) and recon (going deep into hostile territory to patrol or just observe.) These are the most dangerous jobs and many operators are not willing to make the job even more dangerous just to please some grandstanding politicians.

This order has been “under consideration” for three years. The various services had already opened up some infantry training programs to women and discovered two things. First (over 90 percent) of women did not want to serve in any combat unit, especially the infantry. Those women (almost all of them officers) who did apply discovered what female athletes and epidemiologists (doctors who study medical statistics) have long known; women are ten times more likely (than men) to suffer bone injuries and nearly as likely to suffer muscular injuries while engaged in stressful sports (like basketball) or infantry operations. Mental stress is another issue and most women who volunteered to try infantry training dropped out within days because of the combination of mental and physical stress. Proponents of women in combat (none of them combat veterans) dismiss these issues as minor and easily fixed but offer no tangible or proven solutions.

Monty on “the book fetish”

Filed under: Books, Education — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Marking his return from a long absence, Monty posts some thoughts on books and reading at Ace of Spades H.Q.:

What happens when homes have no books? (You’ll have to imagine me saying these words in a rather aghast tone, much as one might use when asking what happens in homes that don’t have flush toilets.)

Well, fear not. The question is misphrased. The problem is not houses without books, as it turns out — the problem is houses without engaged parents.

[…]

It bugs me when people substitute the word “book” for “reading”. I do a lot of reading — a LOT of reading — but I rarely crack an actual book these days unless I absolutely cannot find it for my Kindle. (As happened with Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy, alas.) The problem besetting poor kids is not so much a lack of books as it is a lack of responsible adults in the house who invest the time and effort to engage them in reading — whether the written words are in book or on an LCD screen. What’s lacking here are not bound slabs of paper, but engaged parents.

And for adults? Reading of so-called “serious literature” has declined in recent decades because a lot of so-called “serious literature” is shit. The general cultural debasement started to exhibit first in the turgid academic book field, and since has metastasized out into every field of literary endeavor. Even the sci-fi and mystery ghettos have been infested with the rot of post-modernism and race/class/gender nonsense. And where that has not happened, we get the sub-adolescent rot of stuff like Twilight or its many imitators. This is the modern equivalent of the penny-dreadful, and serves as proof that just because it’s a book, that doesn’t mean the words inside of it are any guarantee of quality or even coherence.

It may be that most people these days eschew books for more engaging audio/visual entertainment, but that’s hardly surprising: that’s been the norm for most of our tenure on earth. Human beings are geared to prefer direct audio/visual stimulus over abstract symbolic input. The ability of common people to buy and consume printed books is a fairly recent one in human history — until the 18th century, most common folk couldn’t afford many books, and probably couldn’t read them either (literacy being nowhere near as universal as today). And in any case most of them wouldn’t have the time to while away reading — it was an age of manual labor and no electric light. You worked the daylight hours away, and when it got dark you went to bed.

I guess what I’m saying is: there are certainly worse things than being a lover of books, but be sure you’re loving the content of the book. (You can love the actual book as well, I guess, as an object of pure art or craft, but that’s a different thing.) And remember that the content of the book can be delivered in any number of ways. Don’t fetishize the delivery vehicle.

The Monkees – “Riu Chiu” HD (Official Music Video) – from THE MONKEES – THE COMPLETE SERIES Blu Ray

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

Uploaded on 15 Dec 2015

The Monkees perform “Riu Chiu” from Episode 47, “The Monkees’ Christmas Show”.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

QotD: Witches

Filed under: Africa, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It turns out that witchcraft beliefs arise in surprisingly similar forms in many parts of the world, which suggests either that there really are witches or (more likely) that there’s something about human minds that often generates this cultural institution. The Azande believed that witches were just as likely to be men as women, and the fear of being called a witch made the Azande careful not to make their neighbors angry or envious. That was my first hint that groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Scott Alexander in “List Of The Passages I Highlighted In My Copy Of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind“, Slate Star Codex, 2014-06-12.

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