Quotulatiousness

August 29, 2016

Vikings beat San Diego Chargers 23-10 in third preseason game

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

Sunday’s grand opening of the new U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis was carried on Fox, so I was able to watch the game between the Chargers and the Vikings from the comfort of my rec room, rather than just following my Twitter feed for live updates. As with all preseason games, there were good and bad aspects, but the third preseason game tends to be the one that teams take quite seriously and usually play their starters for most of the first half. The first round of roster cuts come up very soon — teams have to get down to only 75 players on Tuesday — so this is professional do-or-die time for a lot of players at the bottom of the roster sheets.

For the Vikings, a few starters were held out for the game, including current NFL rushing champ Adrian Peterson (who hasn’t had a meaningful preseason snap in several years), left tackle Matt Kalil, defensive end Everson Griffen, middle linebacker Eric Kendricks, and cornerback Xavier Rhodes. In a bit of a surprise, the starting centre was Joe Berger instead of the veteran John Sullivan (Berger is also a veteran player, but played all of last season at centre after Sullivan was injured).

The first drive of the game was quite encouraging for Vikings fans as the team drove efficiently down the field before the drive stalled in the red zone and they had to settle for a Blair Walsh field goal. Teddy Bridgewater showed that he has some athletic moves on a 22-yard scramble and Jerick McKinnon got a 35-yard gain on the same drive.

The second Vikings drive came quite soon as Harrison Smith intercepted a Philip Rivers pass off a deflection by Trae Waynes, but the team still couldn’t capitalize and came away with only a second field goal.

On San Diego’s next possession, the Vikings dialed up a big blitz but missed running back Melvin Gordon who ran 39 yards for the Chargers’ first score. Backup middle linebacker Audie Cole hit Rivers just as Gordon got the ball and safety Michael Griffin whiffed on Gordon in the open field. After the game, head coach Mike Zimmer said the blame was on him for a bad defensive call.

The Vikings’ next drive ended prematurely as tight end Kyle Rudolph had the ball stripped after a nice throw from Bridgewater and the Chargers were able to recover. San Diego briefly increased the lead on a field goal with about 2:28 left to play in the first half, and then Teddy Bridgewater put on a passing clinic with consecutive passes of 19, 22, and 27 yards and a touchdown to Kyle Rudolph. The two-point attempt after that failed, so the Vikings took a 12-10 lead into the halftime break. Bridgewater finished the half with a stat line of 12-of-16 for 161 yards and a passer rating of 127.3 (down from his 158.3 rating from the first preseason game).

The next points scored were a bit of a mess as tight end MyCole Pruitt took a Shaun Hill pass close to the goal line and then fumbled the ball. The ball was advanced into the end zone by a Chargers player and wide receiver Cordarrelle Patterson recovered the fumble for a Vikings touchdown. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done. First round pick wide receiver Laquon Treadwell caught a pass from Hill for the two-point conversion, moving the score to 20-10. Later in the fourth quarter, Blair Walsh scored another field goal to make the final score 23-10.

In defensive action, former Clemson teammates Mackensie Alexander and Jayron Kearse each secured an interception:

For the second time this preseason, college teammates Mackensie Alexander and Jayron Kearse each grabbed interceptions. Kearse was in the right spot at the right time to take in an overthrown Mike Bercovici pass. Alexander, after dropping an INT opportunity two plays prior, made an impressive interception in the end zone on a pass from Bercovici to Rasheed Bailey. Alexander and Kearse both played for Clemson and both were selected in last May’s draft – Alexander a second-round pick and Kearse a seventh-rounder. Another young defensive back impressed, as well, with Waynes registering a pass breakup and also finishing in good position on other passes thrown his way.

Of course, after doing something really good on the field, Mac Alexander then went over to taunt the San Diego bench, drawing a well-deserved unsportsmanlike conduct penalty:

A dictionary example of a “rookie mistake”.

The Vikings will host the San Francisco 49ers on Thursday in their fourth and final preseason game, after which all teams have to cut down to their 53-man rosters (practice squad players can be signed 24 hours after the “final” rosters are announced). Even more than the second half of the third preseason game, expect pretty much the entire fourth game to be filled with players desperate to attract the attention of coaches in hopes of latching on with a team (their own or some other team … getting into the NFL on a roster is what matters). Translated, this means don’t expect to see any star players take the field for more than token efforts this coming week: no rational coach is willing to risk star players getting injured in utterly meaningless snaps this late in the preseason (and should be strongly criticized if they do).

Update: Tom Pelissero is reporting that the Vikings are looking to trade John Sullivan, and it now makes sense that he didn’t get into the Chargers game.

Debunking “the 1950s as some sort of golden age of progressivism”

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

James O’Brien selects a few imaginative historical myths for debunking:

Here are a few facts about U.S. life 60 years ago, in 1956:

  • The top tax rate was largely irrelevant. The average household income in 1956 was about $4,800. Only 8 percent of families earned more than $10,000 per year. The 91 percent top tax rate (and that really was the top tax rate – a holdover from World War II) kicked in at $400,000 for married couples, or the equivalent of about $3.2 million today). While few individuals made that much money in 1956, people who did earn large sums of money could deduct everything from interest on auto loans to sales taxes, and could – and did – structure things so that their income was funneled through tax shelters at much lower rates.
  • There was a lot less money overall. Adjusted for inflation, that $4,800 average household income would be about $42,000 today. That is roughly 20 percent less than current average household income of about $53,000. Even in 1956, when a Harvard education cost $1000 per year, $400 per month hardly afforded a riotous existence for a family of four. One of the most striking things about 1956 was how little people at the top of their professions earned. Yogi Berra – the highest paid player in Major League Baseball that year – received $58,000. That would be a little over $500,000 today, essentially minimum wage by MLB standards.
  • Tax revenues as a percentage of GDP were about the same as they are today. Since 1945, tax revenues as a percentage of GDP have fluctuated within a fairly narrow range of 15 to 20 percent. The state of the economy, not tax rates, has determined how much the government takes in. Despite the high marginal rates of the 1950s, the tax intake as a percentage of GDP was just 16.5 percent in 1956. It was 18 percent in 2015, so we are actually taking in more, rather than less money, although we are spending it in many new and different areas.
  • Government spent less on everything but defense. The U.S. Federal budget for 1956 might best be described as “Spartan”, not in the sense of being frugal (although it was that) but in the sense of being primarily devoted to preparations for war. In the Cold War climate, defense spending soaked up 60 percent ($47 billion) of the total $76 billion Federal budget – about three times the current percentage — and spending on “social programs” was essentially nonexistent. There was no Department of Education, and total Federal spending on education was just $1.5 billion. Healthcare expenditures were just $1.0 billion; there was no Medicare, (which now represents 15 percent of the total Federal budget), no Medicaid, and certainly no Obamacare. The Interstate Highway Program – so beloved by liberals – was conceived as a defense spending measure and was designed to be self-funding through diesel and gasoline taxes.
  • Opportunities were anything but equal. Racial discrimination was rampant and gender bias was everywhere. Many fields were essentially closed to women and to people of color, while quota systems deterred talented Jewish students from pursuing careers in fields such as engineering and law. We can argue all we want about white privilege in 2016 but in 1956 it was endemic, and bred not just economic but social and cultural inequality.

When we look at the United States in 1956 we see a country with high (but largely irrelevant) marginal tax rates, no social programs to speak of, and a massive defense budget. With Europe still recovering from World War II, the economy is strong, and companies are willing to spend and hire. The country’s focus, however, is not on the welfare of its people, but on its survival in a grim ideological and geopolitical struggle with a ruthless and determined opponent. Those who portray the 1950s as some sort of golden age of progressivism are writing historical fiction, not history.

The 1950s for the United States (and for Canada) were, to borrow a notion from John Scalzi, run in “easy mode” — in game terms, the lowest difficulty setting. There was no peer-level competition in manufacturing or even in services and this provided profit levels that allowed both corporations and workers to enjoy unrealistic long-term conditions that finally came to an end in the gas shocks of the 1970s, after the devastated economies of the defeated Axis powers finally were able to compete again. Twenty-five years of minimal competition left the major corporations totally unable to cope with even minimal competitive pressures from overseas … but willing to use whatever political levers were available to try to quash those foreign upstarts.

But as the courtiers of King Canute were finally obliged to accept, even the King can’t order the tide to recede when it’s convenient.

QotD: Conflating the Hobbesian and Rousseauvian views of mankind

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

[…] there is a second, possibly more important source of the man-as-killer myth in the philosophy of the Enlightenment — Thomas Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature as a “warre of all against all”, and the reactionary naturism of Rousseau and the post-Enlightenment Romantics. Today these originally opposing worldviews have become fused into a view of nature and humanity that combines the worst (and least factual) of both.

Hobbes, writing a rationalization of the system of absolute monarchy under the Stuart kings of England, constructed an argument that in a state of nature without government the conflicting desires of human beings would pit every man against his neighbor in a bloodbath without end. Hobbes referred to and assumed “wild violence” as the normal state of humans in what anthropologists now call “pre-state” societies; that very term, in fact, reflects the Hobbesian myth,

The obvious flaw in Hobbes’s argument is that he mistook a sufficient condition for suppressing the “warre” (the existence of a strong central state) for a necessary one. He underestimated the innate sociability of human beings. The anthropological and historical record affords numerous examples of “pre-state” societies (even quite large multiethnic/multilingual populations) which, while violent against outsiders, successfully maintained internal peace.

If Hobbes underestimated the sociability of man, Rousseau and his followers overestimated it; or, at least, they overestimated the sociability of primitive man. By contrasting the nobility and tranquility they claimed to see in rural nature and the Noble Savage with the all-too-evident filth, poverty and crowding in the booming cities of the Industrial Revolution, they secularized the Fall of Man. As their spiritual descendants today still do, they overlooked the fact that the urban poor had unanimously voted with their feet to escape an even nastier rural poverty.

The Rousseauian myth of technological Man as an ugly scab on the face of pristine Nature has become so pervasive in Western culture as to largely drive out the older opposing image of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” from the popular mind. Perhaps this was inevitable as humans achieved more and more control over their environment; protection from famine, plague, foul weather, predators, and other inconveniences of nature encouraged the fond delusion that only human nastiness makes the world a hard place.

[…]

In reality, Nature is a violent arena of intra- and inter-species competition in which murder for gain is an everyday event and ecological fluctuations commonly lead to mass death. Human societies, outside of wartime, are almost miraculously stable and nonviolent by contrast. But the unconscious prejudice of even educated Westerners today is likely to be that the opposite is true. The Hobbesian view of the “warre of all against all” has survived only as a description of human behavior, not of the wider state of nature. Pop ecology has replaced pop theology; the new myth is of man the killer ape.

Eric S. Raymond, “The Myth of Man the Killer”, Armed and Dangerous, 2003-07-15.

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