Category: Uncategorized

From Peter King’s weekly SI column:

“I learned from Bud Grant that every coach needs three things — a loyal dog, a faithful wife and a heck of a quarterback. Finally, we’ve got a guy giving us good, consistent play.”
— Tampa Bay coach Jon Gruden on Jeff Garcia

The funniest thing about that, if you know anything about Bud Grant, is that order he gives is totally hierarchical. Nothing against wives, but they don’t retrieve now, do they.

There was an amazingly funny TV interview with Bud Grant a few years ago, where the reporter clearly knew that Grant’s priorities were just a little different than the high profile coach these days. The look of utter disbelief on St. Bud’s face when asked if he regretted not being a head coach now because he could have things like his own cologne really had to be seen to be believed.

And yes, I am liking that Adrian Peterson pick right now, thank you very much. I’m not entirely sold on Tavaris Jackson for the future due to his accuracy issues, but he’s got a pocket discipline, he doesn’t throw many dumb passes and he’s definitely no Slash/Vick clone. In fact, twice I was screaming at him to go ahead and run the three yards for the first down when it was right there in front of him.

Speaking of the Vikings-Bears game… never EVER kick the football to Devin Hester. In fact, just give up punting altogether, I don’t care if it’s fourth-and-fifteen on your own twenty, your odds are still better than kicking it to Hester. And forget chucking, hit him with a baseball bat when he lines up as a wide receiver. A flag and 15 yards is better than 80 plus a touchdown. Yesterday, I felt a bit like all the other teams facing Randy Moss in 1998 must have felt.

Oh, and Childress, when it’s second-and-five on the 33, you only need a field goal to win and your running backs have rushed for approximately six thousand yards, how about NOT calling a FREAKING SLANT PATTERN!

I’m in the middle of Halting State right now. It’s very good, the sort of massively technophilic orgy of creative extrapolation that shows Stross at his best. I’ll write a full review next week, in the meantime, suffice it to say that if you like tech porn or games, you have to get this book.

Text sample: “Good, I need to go get something to eat; I’m starving.” She paused for a couple of seconds. “Well, see you tomorrow, then.”

You smiled. “See you.”

A minute later, you sat bolt upright in your chair and swore at yourself for missing a hidden query – but you’re more at home with SQL than socialization: innuendo wasn’t a language they taught in CS lab.

Simon Jenkins correctly sees that the only serious threat is within:

There may be young Muslims and their teachers with a vested interest in talking up such a war. There are those in the West with the same interest, such as the booming armaments and security industries with their think tanks and lobbyists.

Such vested interests need to be exposed as such. To portray Islam as a whole as a concerted threat to western security, and to imply that the West’s democratic institutions and freedoms are not proof against that threat, is absurd and close to treason.

Merely ending Muslim immigration and sending non-citizens home would be enough to end the only genuine threat Muslims pose anywhere in the West, which is demographic. The fact that the West’s leaders won’t do that while pointing to Iranian and Saudi Arabian Muslims as proving the imminent need for restricting Western freedom tends to show that they are, in fact, entirely treasonous.

They should replace Maureen Dowd with him every week:

I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

I’d certainly rather vote for Colbert than for Clinton or Giuliani.

My Manning sits over the bye week,
My Manning sits down this weekend.
My Manning sits on my bench roster,
Please bring back my Manning, my friend.

It’s a good thing I’m enjoying watching the games, because both my fantasy teams are totally shot. That’s the last time I make the mistake of creating two practically identical teams….

I’m no fan of Doris Lessing, and I have little doubt that Harold Bloom was wrong when he dismissed her Nobel Prize for literature as “pure political correctness. However, she did, some years ago, express a few cogent thoughts on the concept:

WHILE we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness….

I know the obfuscations of academia did not begin with Communism — as Swift, for one, tells us — but the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world.

This is one of the many reasons I harbor such disdain for academia and why I have such confidence in taking on some of its supposedly brighter lights. Academics tend to be more intelligent than the average, but they are far from the only cognitive elite; moreover, the academics are intellectually enervated by their safe, mono-ideological, politically correct environment.

It’s interesting to note Richard Dawkins’s recent commitment to raising atheist consciousness in light of Lessing’s thoughts on the subject: ““Raising consciousness,” like “commitment,” like “political correctness,” is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.”

The military is most unimpressed with neocon strategery:

The U.S. mission in Iraq is a “nightmare with no end in sight” because of political misjudgments after the fall of Saddam Hussein that continue today, a former chief of U.S.-led forces said Friday.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who commanded coalition troops for a year beginning June 2003, cast a wide net of blame for both political and military shortcomings in Iraq that helped open the way for the insurgency — such as disbanding the Saddam-era military and failing to cement ties with tribal leaders and quickly establish civilian government after Saddam was toppled.

He called current strategies — including the deployment of 30,000 additional forces earlier this year — a “desperate attempt” to make up for years of misguided policies in Iraq.

I noticed that there was what appeared to be a strategic flaw back in April 2004, before I’d figured out that the broken ceasefire agreement which justified the war was, in fact, not even an agreement to which the USA was a party.

“Still, the defeat of two minor military powers by the greatest military machine history has ever known does not make George Bush a great wartime president. Indeed, the jury is far from in on the question of whether he can even be considered successful at this juncture. It is even possible that he will come to be judged a complete failure in the execution, just as Bill Clinton failed at the preparation.

The primary reason for my concern about the conduct of this so-called war – still undeclared – stems from this quote from Clausewitz, the military theorist:

Our position, then, is that a theater of war, be it large or small, and the forces stationed there, no matter what their size, represent the sort of unity in which a single center of gravity can be identified. That is the place where the decision should be reached; a victory at that point is in its fullest sense identical with the defense of the theater of operations.“

Ann Coulter doesn’t even have to try to offend those who are eager to pretend to be shocked. Apparently Deutsch hasn’t been paying much attention for, oh, the last two thousand years or so:

Slash-and-burn columnist Ann Coulter shocked a cable TV talk-show audience Monday when she declared that Jews need to be “perfected” by becoming Christians, and that America would be better off if everyone were Christian.

Coulter made the remarkable statements during an often heated appearance to promote her new book on advertising guru Donny Deutsch’s CNBC show “The Big Idea.”

In response to a question from Deutsch asking Coulter if “it would be better if we were all Christian,” the controversial columnist responded: “Yes.”

“We should all be Christian?” Deutsch repeated.

“Yes,” Coulter responded, asking Deutsch, who is Jewish, if he would like to “come to church with me.”

Deutsch, pressing Coulter further, asked, “We should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians?” She responded: “Yeah.”

Coulter deflected Deutsch’s assertion that her comments were anti-Semitic, matter-of-factly telling the show’s obviously upset host, “That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews.”

I’ll go Ann one better. Not only would it be better if we were all Christians, it WILL be better WHEN we are all Christians – or at least, acknowledging Jesus Christ. Because every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The only question is whether you do it now or later.

Rod Dreher explains that there’s more to the staunch African Christian stance against homosexuality than is generally understood:

The Muslim context helps explain the sensitivity of gay issues in one other key respect. In the region later known as Uganda, Christianity first arrived in the 1870s, when the area was already under Muslim influence and a hunting ground for Arab slave-raiders. The king of Buganda had adopted Arab customs of pederasty, and he expected the young men of his court to submit to his demands. But a growing number of Christian courtiers and pages refused to participate, despite his threats, and an enraged king launched a persecution that resulted in hundreds of martyrdoms: On a single day, some 30 Bugandans were burned alive. Yet the area’s churches flourished, and, eventually, the British expelled the Arab slavers. That foundation story remains well-known in the region, and it intertwines Christianity with resistance to tyranny and Muslim imperialism–both symbolized by sexual deviance.

Christians under attack from Muslims, tyrants and homosexuals… plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

And before the gay apologists bring up the ubiquitous and demonstrably false claim that pederasty has no connection with homosexuality, the Department of Justice statistics indicate that a gay man is approximately 11.5x more likely to abuse a male child than a normally oriented man is to abuse a female one.