rfl wrote:

Did you see any evidence of a Top 10, let alone Top 5, defense in OAK?

I mean, actual EVIDENCE! Like, “I could SEE it …” Not hopes and expectations and calculations. But manifest signs of the sort of dominance that makes offenses dread games against actual Top 5 Defenses.

If so, I’d really like to hear what it is that you saw.

I saw no evidence, but then again, I didn’t EXPECT to see it.

Frustration is unmet expectation. I saw what I expected to see, so I’m not frustrated. I expected Vanilla and I got it. I expected the Raiders to gameplan us a little, which they did which put them at a bit of an advantage. And it did.

Btw, it was the same on the other side. They seemed to not only gameplan for us a little, but they also went after Washington after Saffold went out with stunts and blitzes, which seemed pretty bush league to do in a preseason game, but why not? It’s a chance to get in work and see what you have so, try it.

And, Oakland is a much improved team over last year.

Were we sloppy? Yep.

Do I expect us to carry that level of sloppy into the season? No way.

Am I the least bit concerned? No. And I have no real reason to be. Now, if we see more of that against the Titans, then yes, I’ll begin to be concerned. But, no, I’m not concerned at this time.

For those of us who’ve had to look for streams because we can’t or won’t do DirecTV, there’s an option in the wild.

I’ll gladly speak of this, but only in PM. Dunno how long it will last, but it works for both mobile and computer.

I think that Foles is a very good match for what Fisher wants to do. A healthy Bradford would be a better match, but we were never offered that option…

Foles is a big guy who can take a hit and he’s pretty good delivering a catchable ball.

I really like him and I really, really like him in this offense which I don’t expect is going to have many 4th and 5th options for him to progress through…

The fact that they’re bringing him along with such deliberation is encouraging. Plus, I think giving him a few games will help in that the OL will have a few games to gel.

it’s not like it hurt ODB to miss the first few games of the season… Stars shine and I think Gurley will explode onto the scene once he’s ready.

Man!!! That having to pee thing is a THING now!!!

I swear I used to be able to down a massive drink and watch a 2:30 action flick and not even use the head before going home. Now, I’m lucky if I can make it through a 2 hour movie and not have kidney damage from holding it from just having a 24 oz water…

I swear, I’m not drinking ANYTHING when that Warcraft movie comes out because I’m not going to miss a second of it!!!

I may be a complete pig, but damn. I know comic artists have caricatured the human body, both male and female for decades, but golly gee willickers, that’s a tight suit. Frankly, I’m confused about the physics of how she gets it on. It’s not like it has any zippers, snaps, buttons or velcro…

Anyway, I also enjoy the physics (or lack thereof) in comics and comic movies.

It’s why I refer to them as popcorn movies. If I tried to take them seriously, I’d get all mad. If I judge them by how fast I’m shoveling the popcorn into my face, then I find that THAT is actually a pretty good metric of how much I’m enjoying the movie on a visceral level without thinking too much.

In other words, they’ve done enough to allow me to continue to suspend my disbelief. It helps that I’m a willing co-dependent in this relationship…

Although, now that I’ve lost 60lbs (down to 221 from my high of 282) and don’t eat popcorn at the movies, I’ll have to figure something else out.

I’ve been to the movies a couple of times since I stopped eating popcorn and dammit, it’s hard. I LOVES me that big bucket!!!

Well, great. They can figure out the data on which people pull which levers or punch which buttons and that can lead to a very manipulative set of political arguments which drive certain people to the polls or are intended to keep others away.

We see that already.

And governance weeps.

Are they using analytics to see how they can navigate the process and get infrastructure projects funded?

Hell, no. 60 THOUSAND red tagged bridges and counting and the politicians are still masturbating to poll numbers.

It’s fucking disgusting…, but at least now I know if I ever wanna see a 435 person circle jerk, I only need to watch a House vote on C-Span…

Analytics applied to politics. Drill down just a step or two further and candidates will be able to “micro-pander” in order to cater on a personal level.

Analytics holds such promise for solving some of our biggest problems, but instead we’re going to misuse it to manipulate ourselves into an Idiocracy.

smh

Well, as long as none of this leads to extended readings of Vogon poetry, I’m content to follow along.

There are times when the FACTS are indisputable and yet, the history is unclear expressly due to revisionist efforts like we’ve seen since the cessation of hostilities that ended the Civil War in 1865.

So, we have some choices.

We can validate the revisionists, ignore their motives and continue to exist in this fog of historical uncertainty or…

We can embrace the known FACTS which delineate a clear, substantiated, inexorable and undeniable truth about the actual history as it happened, as acknowledged by the participants at the time and subsequently validated with validated, archived documents from that time.

One path essentially embraces truth. The other embraces one group’s motives by furthering the false propaganda surrounding the circumstances of the War.

It’s not a matter of opinion or agreeing to disagree. It’s really a matter of agreeing that facts matter or they don’t. Because if they do, then one can’t cherry pick one state’s secession declaration whilst ignoring all the others as they were made in concert and consultation. The statements and actions of the various actors before, during and after the Civil War began (including how black companies of the North were treated) paint a singularly stark picture without ambiguity or nuance.

There are plenty of things that are left to dispute in this wide, wide world. That the south fought expressly FOR slavery under the guise of state’s rights isn’t one of them. That’s a fact and no amount of dedicated whitewashing will change that. Why?

Well, it never occurred to the South that they would lose, so they made all these speeches and folks wrote them down. And then they wrote letters and they were saved. And they passed resolutions in their Houses…etc. it was only after when they looked at the POLITICS that we saw folks who had vociferously argued that slavery was the South, turned and argued that slavery was, but an ancillary cause. The root was Northern Agression and States Rights.

But, that’s a bald-face lie. We KNOW it is. We have the proof.

So, that’s all for me on this. I know folks will argue on this, but then again, folks still don’t believe in Climate Change, either… /shrug.

I’m just tired of Federalism.

It’s holding this nation back, truthfully.

Are we American or are we Texans and New Yorkers and Californians and Floridians? Because whenever there’s a HUGE need, we’re Americans. Whenever someone doesn’t like something, the retreat is to states rights.

The government is supposed to be big enough to help Americans in time of war and natural disaster, but so damn small that it can’t force a guy to manage a creek on his property without his say so.

The cognitive dissonance is staggering. It just..is.

If a massive meteor comes to hit the earth, will it matter about “states rights”? If Aliens come, will “states rights” matter? If a pandemic sweeps the planet, will people look to STATE governments to stem the tide or the FEDERAL government, the CDC, the NIH, and the FEDERAL institutions? If we go to war, will the states call up militias to constitute an Army? Oh yeah, we abandoned that and have the largest military industrial complex on the planet, so the people will rely on the FEDERAL government to wage war.

At the most basic level, the Federalist model made sense before the modern age.

In the modern age, the Federalist model only stops us from being what we should be FIRST and FOREMOST: AMERICANS. Not South Carolinians, Georgians, South Dakotans, Washingtonians, or Ohioans, but Americans. When I was in the Navy, we served under ONE flag and it sure wasn’t any STATE flag, it was Old Glory, the Red, White and Blue, our National Flag.

So all this “states this” and “states that” is, for me, a relic of the past that allows folks to try to have their cake and eat it, too… to have all the benefits of a massive federal government which is REQUIRED to manage a population of 300+ Million people while at the same time, trying to enjoy the benefits of local control.

The problem is that so much freaking time is wasted when the demands and desires of local control conflict with the demands and desires of centralized control.

And yes, I mean control. And I trust the Federal government to conduct war and so many government programs so much more than the states, it’s not even funny. In most states, their biggest jobs are education and roads. Where are societies biggest failures right now??? Education and roads… So, yeah… not thinking putting more trust in states is the way to go.

Europe under the Eurozone model is struggling with a version of the Federalist model, especially because of the IMF and their monetary policies (won’t get into that…). Bottom line is that they have sovereign nations that ultimately have to answer to one another under a shared economic incentive which isn’t managed. So, they have needs without a true governing body and as we see with the Greek crisis and with other crises, they end up being chasing their tails and having to negotiate every solution as if it were a trade agreement (and some of them kind of are). Not saying Europe should drop all the sovereign states and just become one massive country, but they also highlight the issues with Federalism.

In our case, we aren’t from sovereign countries aggregated for an economic purpose. We are all Americans, united under one banner and it’s unfortunate that a relic of our founding has become such a hindrance to true democracy as we try to solve our biggest problems going forward.

To wit. We could still keep the states as states, but they’d be more like provinces. Many functions could be relegated to the federal government and managed locally, such that local solutions would still be available while being within accordance with Federal laws.

So many things including the elimination of state laws v federal laws and allowing for a much more uniform legal system as well as uniform enforcement of law across the country would be at least possible.

I realize some folks read this and think, “one world government” or “I don’t trust the Federal government”, but I don’t know how to respond to folks who say these things. I don’t explicitly trust the Federal government, either, but the alternative is, what? What we have? Each state doing different things and having us spend time in 50 state houses figuring out the answers 50 different times and then having each populace hope it works out for them?

We wonder why government is so inefficient. Maybe because we spend time trying to figure out the answers to the same problem 50 times over and then fight over it when we come up with different answers in different places.

I’ll go to my death bed thinking if we are Americans in times of War, Crisis, and Natural Disaster, why can’t we just be Americans every day? Just and only Americans? Why can’t that be enough?

Was just talking about this with my son (he’s 23).

How does one process arguably the greatest comedy album of all time and the foundation for many of the greatest comedians of today (the storytellers as opposed to the joke tellers that came from the vaudeville tradition) with what we know about Cosby now?

Bill Cosby: Himself is arguably the greatest comedy album and comedy concert of all time. And I include Richard Pryor’s Live on the Sunset Strip on that list.

Pryor was good. Amazing, but Cosby at that time was the greatest ever. And if none of this had happened, I have no doubt that he’d have to be on the Mt. Rushmore of comedians.

Now? I dunno. How do we process this now?

Do we deal with it like the Hall of Fame? I mean, we haven’t yanked Ty Cobb out and he was a horrible human being in a lot of ways, and I mean horrible.

I’m really just asking the question because I don’t have an answer… and I don’t presume that there is any one answer. It may just be different for each person.

You bring up an interesting point.

I don’t doubt that the rank and file soldier while actually fighting wasn’t fighting for the pocketbook for the Southern plantation owner any more than the modern Marine fights for Haliburton or Tyco.

That said, what I stated isn’t any less true. The southern states differed and argued with the northern states on a number of very contentious matters and NONE of them rose to the level where secession was remotely an option.

Consider that. NO OTHER ISSUE was so contentious that the SOUTH as a confederation of states would secede from the Union. Nothing was even close.

So, while “States Rights” is, in fact, the correct column heading under which war was waged, the ONLY States Right that was worth waging war? Slavery. It was a column with ONE entry.

Thus, in essence, they become equivalent. The distinction cannot be made between the States Rights argument and the Preservation of Slavery argument because there was NO OTHER States Right for which the Southern States would remotely consider seceding and waging war. Nothing.

So, while I do hear what you’re saying and I agree about the rank and file not being preoccupied with slavery while marching in crappy conditions or with musket balls flying past them or smelling gangrene or hearing a doctor perform grizzly amputations with a rudimentary bone saw, that does NOT preclude that those soldiers did NOT agree that the South should, in fact, be allowed slaves and believe in the institution of slavery and that fighting to defend that and the way of life that accompanied that was worth fighting for.

Of course the average foot soldier had little to no stake in reaping the rewards of the war, north or south.

Historically, they almost never do.