Forum Replies Created
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Really?
Be careful what you wish for.
We started ballot propositions in California in the late 70s, so that we could pass bills that them damn politicians won’t or can’t. Great idea.
Now we get Safe Drinking Water initiatives that are backed by astroturf “citizens groups” that get their money from Monsanto, and propositions to reform education financing, only there will suddenly be 3 propositions on the same ballot that all claim to do great things for education reform, all with poison pills that will have to be litigated, and backed by carefully concealed interests, and to be honest, I don’t think most California voters actually read the complete text of each proposition before making their voting decisions.
And if the stadium goes to a vote in Inglewood, it will all be about traffic congestion, and crime, and drunkenness, and business revenue, and taxes in versus taxes out, with all kinds of tv commercials claiming completely different things with no way of knowing if anybody is even trying to tell the truth, and even if they are, if what they are saying is actually accurate because who the hell can figure any of this out?
So the real vote will be on “Do you want the NFL, specifically the Rams, right here in Inglewood, or not?” because that’s all most of the voters will care about, and all the other issues are just going to be market tested to find out where it is worthwhile to invest advertising dollars to bang a drum long enough to chip off a percentage of undecided voters.
If you want that kind of democracy in West Virginia, you are welcome to take California’s version of it, as far as I’m concerned.
What we’ve ended up with here is a lot of voters thinking they know more than the legislators, and that they can budget better than the state government can (cuz gov’t misappropriates all the $), and a lot of good causes got voted intractable amounts of the general budget to the point that our state government can’t actually govern anything anymore, and the voters have gone and misspent the money worse than the government ever did, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.
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Ok, well then
i changed my mind.I just want to decide
everything myself.wv ram makes all the
decisions. a wv-ram-ocracy.My decision is:
Rams go back to LA
and wear blue and white.San Diego stays in San Diego
and they wear the old Lance Allworth Uniforms.Raiders stay in Oakland.
Dallas moves to St.Louis
and become the St.Louis Stallions.Washington changes its name to
the Washington Cowboys.Dallas fans can root for Houston.
Problems solved. Give me a beer.
w
vw
v========================================
LaramThis was sent to me by someone in my office. Sorry Admins no link.
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http://www.pe.com/articles/repeating-754888-san-diego.html
RAMS: History is repeating itself
Rams equipment manager Todd Hewitt (right) and assistant Jim Lake pack up the team’s equipment in early 1995 for the move from Anaheim to St. Louis.
Published: Nov. 23, 2014 Updated: Nov. 25, 2014 12:16 a.m.
SAN DIEGO — Small crowds. Struggles on the field. And rumors, almost daily, about the home team’s future destination.
Hey, St. Louis? We’ve been there.What that Missouri city is experiencing now, as rumors of the Rams’ relocation (re-relocation?) to Los Angeles, continue, is exactly what the team’s Southern California fan base experienced in 1993 and ’94, during the last stages of the team’s 49-year tenure in Los Angeles/Anaheim.
Really, the seeds of SoCal’s loss of the Rams began more than a decade before the deed was actually done. When Carroll Rosenbloom decided to move the team from the Coliseum to Anaheim Stadium, effective with the 1980 season, the deal included the rights to develop part of the Big A’s parking lot—a deal that drew protests from the Autrys, owners of the Angels. (Arte Moreno may appreciate the irony.)
That development never took place, and ultimately—when the city of Anaheim built what is now Honda Center and lured an NHL expansion team (now the Ducks)—the Rams leveraged it into an escape clause that would allow them to break their lease with 15 months notice and a $30 million reimbursement to the city of Anaheim, the unpaid debt involved with the expansion of the stadium for football.
By this time, Georgia Frontiere was in charge. She’d inherited the team from her late husband, Rosenbloom (and subsequently remarried). And I will forever remain convinced that Georgia and her henchman, John Shaw, intentionally degraded the product on the field to facilitate a move.
By the time This Space took over the P-E Rams beat from the esteemed Matt Jocks in 1993, the team was coming off two losing seasons, after a decade in which the Rams won or contended for division titles and drew strong crowds to the Big A (even with the Raiders carving up the market after their move to the Coliseum in 1982).
Chuck Knox was the coach, in his dotage as an NFL coach. The quarterback, Jim Everett, was on the descent. The cornerback, Darryl Henley, was about to be indicted for his part (along with a Rams cheerleader) in a cocaine distribution ring. Jerome Bettis was a rookie, future Hall of Famer Jackie Slater was injured, and most of the rest of the roster was a sea of mediocrity.
It was in this environment that, in the middle of the 1993 season, the rumors began. Before a November 1 game in San Francisco, CBS’ NFL pregame show reported that the Rams had been in contact with Baltimore, which was hedging its bets if it had lost out in expansion (which it ultimately did, with Jacksonville being picked to enter the league with Charlotte).
That brought the bizarre scene of Shaw, the team’s executive vice president, addressing beat writers on a concourse outside the locker room tunnel in Candlestick Park, denying the rumors.
“That is totally true, 100 percent untrue,” Shaw said. “There’s been so many rumors about the sale of this team, the movement of this team in the last 15 years, that really nothing surprises me … (A Baltimore writer) asked me if we had a lease we could get out of. I think we answered that, ‘Yes, for a lot of money.’ ”
Not that much, as it turned out. And a little over a month later, Shaw confirmed that, indeed, the Rams had been contacted by representatives from not only Baltimore but St. Louis and Memphis.
“We have not asked (Anaheim) for anything,” Shaw said then. ” . . . I don’t want to give the impression that we’re negotiating lease concessions or anything like that with the city, because we’re not.
“We’re just going to have to make a decision at some time as to whether this situation here, even if it was modified or changed, would be such that we could ever be competitive.”
Ominous words, reinforced later that month when Frontiere told the Los Angeles Times that a move was “something that you have to consider. It’s just a fact of life. People do look at other possibilities in life.”
(Then again, the Rams management in those days was positively chatty compared with the current version. Owner Stan Kroenke, whose purchase of 60 acres near Hollywood Park and reported negotiations for 300 additional acres have spurred the latest Rams-to-L.A. rumors, has been equally ominous in his silence.)
Going into the 1994 season, it was pretty much assumed that the moving vans were assembling. The team finished 4-12, and average attendance was 42,312, “the remnants of a fan base alienated beyond repair,” I wrote in a 2004 reminiscence of the final year.
A curious confluence: During that 1994 season, the Los Angeles Rams played (and won) a game in Kansas City Sept. 25, and members of the St. Louis media crossed the state to eyeball the city’s potential next NFL team.
Flash forward to 2014. The Rams and Chargers play in San Diego this afternoon, and a check of the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot before the game showed a lot – a LOT – of fans wearing Rams gear. And maybe 35 to 40 percent of it was in the team’s current navy blue and old gold colors. The vast majority? The royal blue and yellow colors the team wore in Los Angeles and Anaheim.
One fan behind the Rams bench during warmups held a sign: “Come Home Rams (to) L.A.” Another draped a “Los Angeles Rams” banner over the railing momentarily.
At least one Rams booster club is here in force, holding a tailgate in Lot P3 (the word having been spread by the “Bring Back The Los Angeles Rams” page on facebook.
Yes, St. Louis, we feel your pain. Sort of. Just not enough to lift a finger to stop the repossession.
<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>wv wrote:</div>
http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/draft/mock-draftRang, Kirwin, Brugler Mock:
Rang Amari Cooper
Kirwin Andrus Peat
Brugler Kevin Whitew
v
<span class=”d4pbbc-font-color” style=”color: blue”>got that. 4 posts ago.
</span>Who do you think the “safest” pick is at 10, Ag ?
A “cant miss” guy.
w
vYeah….. Saffold and this guy at Guard. T-Rob and Long/Barksdale at tackle. That would make us one center away from getting me really excited
Yeah, that’d be a good way to go.
But would it be better than, say,
taking White/Cooper at 10,
and then taking the best Guard/Tackle with
the 2nd round pick,
and a QB with the 3rd rd pick ?Btw, fwiw, i still like the idea
of bringing in Josh Freeman.
I mean, why not?
w
vA guy on reddit redid them in photoshop. He did a better job. http://imgur.com/a/Jx2U6
Here’s the Rams “new” one.
Interesting.
That one could be their “throw-forward” one.
The blue and whites could be the “throw-back” one.w
v==============================
The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/01/life-in-the-sickest-town-in-america/384718/
Sickest Town in AmericaI drove from one of the healthiest counties in the country to the least-healthy, both in the same state. Here’s what I learned about work, well-being, and happiness.
Olga Khazan
Donald Rose has no teeth, but that’s not his biggest problem. A camouflage hat droops over his ancient, wire-framed glasses. He’s only 43, but he looks much older.
I met him one day in October as he sat on a tan metal folding chair in the hallway of Riverview School, one of the few schools—few buildings, really—in the coal-mining town of Grundy, Virginia. That day it was the site of a free clinic, the Remote Area Medical. Rose was there to get new glasses—he’s on Medicare, which doesn’t cover most vision services.
Remote Area Medical was founded in 1985 by Stan Brock, a 79-year-old Brit who wears a tan Air-Force-style uniform and formerly hosted a nature TV show called Wild Kingdom. Even after he spent time in the wilds of Guyana, Brock came to the conclusion that poor Americans needed access to medical care about as badly as the Guyanese did. Now Remote Area Medical holds 20 or so packed clinics all over the country each year, providing free checkups and services to low-income families who pour in from around the region.
When I pulled into the school parking lot, someone was sleeping in the small yellow car in the next space, fast-food wrappers spread out on the dashboard. Inside, the clinic’s patrons looked more or less able-bodied. Most of the women were overweight, and the majority of the people I talked to were missing some of their teeth. But they were walking and talking, or shuffling patiently along the beige halls as they waited for their names to be called. There weren’t a lot of crutches and wheelchairs.
Yet many of the people in the surrounding county, Buchanan, derive their income from Social Security Disability Insurance, the government program for people who are deemed unfit for work because of permanent physical or mental wounds. Along with neighboring counties, Buchanan has one of the highest percentages of adult disability recipients in the nation, according to a 2014 analysis by the Urban Institute’s Stephan Lindner. Nearly 20 percent of the area’s adult residents received government SSDI benefits in 2011, the most recent year Lindner was able to analyze.
According to Lindner’s calculations, five of the 10 counties that have the most people on disability are in Virginia—and so are four of the lowest, making the state an emblem of how wealth and work determine health and well-being. Six hours to the north, in Arlington, Fairfax, and Loudoun Counties, just one out of every hundred adults draws SSDI benefits. But Buchanan county is home to a shadow economy of maimed workers, eking out a living the only way they can—by joining the nation’s increasingly sizable disability rolls. “On certain days of the month you stay away from the post office,” says Priscilla Harris, a professor who teaches at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, “because that’s when the disability checks are coming in.”
But if this place has the scenery of the Belgian Ardennes, it has the health statistics of Bangladesh.Just about everyone I spoke with at the Grundy clinic was a former manual worker, or married to one, and most had a story of a bone-crushing accident that had left them (or their spouse) out of work forever. For Rose, who came from the nearby town of Council, that day came in 1996, when he was pinned between two pillars in his job at a sawmill. He suffered through work until 2001, he told me, when he finally started collecting “his check,” as it’s often called. He had to go to a doctor to prove that he was truly hurting—he has deteriorating discs, he says, and chronic back pain. He was turned down twice, he thinks because he was just 30 years old at the time. Now the government sends him a monthly check for $956.
Each classroom at Riverview School had a different specialist tucked inside—in one, an optometrist measured eyes with her chart projected on the classroom wall. She showed me a picture she took in a nearby town of a man who, unable to afford new glasses and rapidly losing eyesight, had taped a stray plastic lens over his existing glasses. The clinic had brought along two glasses-manufacturing RVs where technicians could make patients like Rose a fresh set of glasses, including frames, in just a few hours.
As for his teeth? Rose’s diabetes loosened them. “They went ahead and pulled them all,” he said. He assured me that being toothless was not as grave a life-change as the toothed might imagine it to be.
“I can still eat a steak, trust me,” he says. “I use my tongue and my gums.” … see link for rest of article…
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top ten, bottom ten
http://www.well-beingindex.com/alaska-leads-u.s.-states-in-well-being-for-first-time“Data helps us make informed decisions”….. all teams should collect analytical data to help with the decision making process.
Hard to believe some teams are still skeptical.
Well all the writing on this subject,
when it comes to football,
is kinda vague. I mean, I’d
like to read some specific examples of how
and when it’s “worked”.
What exactly are they measuring? How does it
differ from the old tried-and-true methods?w
vYeah, its a fascinating issue. I am always perplexed by it.
But I’ll say this — I would put the ‘burden of proof’ on
the GMO Corporations to PROVE its safe. I would
not put the burden on the consumers.I’d also make the GMO Corps stop fighting honest,
open and accurate Labeling of their products.
Why are they fighting that? Let consumers have
a choice and decide for themselves.Personally, like i say, I doubt if there is a problem
with most GMO food. But i do think, sooner or later
there will be a problem. Just a guess though.One of the things i’d discuss with that Pro-GMO-writer
is — he makes it seem like this is a debate about “science”.
But there is no “pure food science,”
there’s only science-mixed-with-mega-Corporations.
And the Corporations have a long record
of lying about…um….everything.w
v
