Mooch

Now to get my obvious disagreements out of the way, I am a Vikings fan. I have been for probably better than thirty years, and think Freddie Zamberletti is the best thing to ever happen to the NFL. This is a complete aside, but Fred Zamberletti has been the Minnesota Vikings team trainer since Day One and to the best of my knowledge still is. That's close to 45 years now, and while he doesn't have a number, his name belongs up there above the numbers the team has retired.

So, loyalties described, what the Detroit Lions did today is a travesty. Detroit, for years, has been a doormat. This is inexcusable in so many ways it isn't funny. For a decade, they had, HANDS DOWN, the best running back in the NFL. Barry Sanders is the only running back who I would consider better than Jim Brown. Others in the same category? Yes. Better? No. No one other than Barry.

Herman Moore? Outstanding. Top 10 receiver in the history of the league. Lomas Brown? Top five left tackle in the 90's. Robert Porcher? Top 10 defensive lineman. They HAD talent. I could go on and talk about Chris Spielman and Bennie Blades (sad story there). In any case, this was a team with some potential.

This evening, they fired Steve Mariucci as head coach. This was utterly wrong. They should have fired Matt Millen as GM and kept The Mooch. In the last four years, Detroit has drafted guys in skill position after skill position after skill position, and what they have to show for it is the best receiver corps I've seen, a great running back, a solid quarterback, and a pile of shit line that can't protect any inch of those draft picks.

Matt Millen should be out on his ass.

As a former linebacker, Millen is someone who should know this better than anyone. Games are won and lost in the trench. He has ignored the trench for his entire tenure. For those of you who know football, give me Dan Marino, Walter Payton, Barry Sanders, Cris Carter, Jerry Rice, and Kellen Winslow (Sr, not Jr) and without a line, I'll show you a team that can beat anyone around, and still can't pull together 7 wins. That by the way, is the best all around team I can make out of history.

The truth is, games are won and lost in the same place they have always been won and lost, on the line. When the Bears went 15-1 in 1985, they did it with the best offensive and defensive lines anyone had seen. The Giants teams were outstanding. The Cowboys (as much as I hate them), Giants, Redskins, Broncos, Packers, Bucs, and every other team you can name that went on to what is considered "greatness" all have one thing in common. They all have lines from hell.

Mooch got fired earlier because Matt Millen didn't give him the personel to be a great team and still expected that from him. There is a reason guys like Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson are Super Bowl winning quarterbacks. It isn't because they're great, it's because they had great lines infront of them.

hopefully, the Detroit owners will figure out their mistake, because if they don't, someone else is going to grab Mooch, and he's going to make Detroit pay for it for the next 20 years.

Low Quality Spam

I miss the good old days of junk email. It used to be I would open my email box, and there would be an acre of crappy spam, it was irritating, but sometimes entertaining. "MILFs want to suck you DRY!" I mean hey, I'm a guy, I'm single, I like getting laid just as much as the next guy. Not that I'm about to give my credit card information to some dump so I can stare at bad porn, that'd be dumb to actually do, but even as crummy as the spam was, once in a while there would be something humorous.

Not anymore. These days I open my email box and inside is a sea of flotsam telling me to buy their cheap fake rolexes, or how I can get ciialis cheap or viagra, or how some new company that doesn't exist is offering to let me get in on the start up for something that is just going to explode! I was much happier getting bad porn ads than I am with this crap.

And if it's not spam rolex copies, it's viruses telling me that my account is going to be shut down. Look, go out, and get a virus scanner. Hell, go to McAfee and use their online one, it's free, but stop leaving your computer wide open to these things! If you have a computer and don't protect it, I have news for you. Your computer will be stolen. No, it won't be taken off your desk, it will still be there, except it will be working for someone else.

A Cheerful Mistake

Once in a great while someone does something intended to have one result, but the actual one is something completely different. It is entirely possible such an error was made in Kansas yesterday. The Kansas board of education passed new standards which are intended to weaken the teaching of evolution. The standards they adopted are anything but.

Basically what they said was, that it should be taught with a critical eye. "Question everything." That sentiment is at the heart of all things science, and now they have made that idea the core of the primary point of biology. Science teachers, more than many other areas, are prickly beasts, and so now they are told they must teach their students to operate in this arena. As teachers of social studies and english may be about to discover, students who question everything are not anything they bargained for.

To be sure, the average student will be just as docile as any bored teenager is. The problem is, every school has at least one and often more than a few very good ones. At the tender age of 13 or 14, they will find out, "oh, you mean I can ask questions that may make the teacher look like an idiot?" Now the science teachers won't mind this too much, for the most part they will have a better understanding of most every part of their subject. The same cannot be said of teachers in other areas. For whatever reason, teachers in other subjects run across students who have taken an interest in some specific, the Miracle at Midway, the mistakes in Vietnam, the writing of Faulkner. And when that happens, they will now be confronted with a room full of students who will no longer accept their statements, they will ask questions. And not the kind of question that asks "what happened here" but more on the line of "what did this mean in terms of this thing over here?" Oops.

Kansas based their faulty choice on the concept that there are recent findings in molecular biology and the fossil record that call evolution into question. Now I haven't seen anything of the sort, and I do look for such things to see what explanations of the "monster" might be. Kansas has stepped into a mistake that may actually improve the quality of education.

I feel sorry for the teachers of dubious ability there. They are about to find out what happens when you teach critical thinking to people who are learning rebellion, and not college students who are trying to find their place in the world. The science teachers are going to have fun if they want to turn their fellow "educators" into gruel.

And as a lovely aside, the school board that put together the Pennsylvania ID item now in court? Was completely demolished in Tuesday elections. It's quite heartening to see the anti-science slapped down.

"The Big Lie"

This is something that has been bothering me for quite some time, but I couldn't quite figure out what it was until recently. In the run up to the war in Iraq, the administration was screaming, "Chemical! Biological! Nuclear soon!" at the top of their lungs to anyone and everyone. We now know that to be wrong, and the administration has been sort of saying, "Well we were wrong, but we could have been right and so it was still worth it."

This tickled a little thought in the back of my mind, and it starts with this. During the race to Bagdad, I was watching a lot of MSNBC, and their primary guy on the ground was David Bloom, driving with the 3rd Infantry up the highway to Bagdad. Every day we would see reports by Bloom from the top of a Bradley or back of a Hummer as they drove up the road. What was notable about this was, and this was the start of an unravelling thread, youcould always see him. Not only could you see him, you could see all the other guys around him too. And what was missing from that picture was, MOPP suits. I never noticed a single one.

Okay, that seems strange. Well, let's put that together with a couple over things, like lack of body armor and the hillbilly armor welded to those Hummers. At this point I'm getting curious. Why weren't any of these either issued, or sent out in so sub-standard a way? I'm not sure but that may not be indicative of anything.

Then yet another one of those little bits of information popped in, and it was the size of force that was sent in, about 120,000 guys, even fewer than are on the ground now. At this point something is screaming at me that this whole scenario is wrong. And here's what it is.

"Saddam Hussain has chemical and biologic weapons and will use them. We have to go get him because of this."

That premise is completely wrong and the people running the operation had to know it was completely wrong. Let us say for the sake of argument, that Saddam had reconstitued his weapons abilities. If that is true, then the invasion looks like Desert One as the gas shells start landing all around the US troops on the road. Tens of thousands of them are killed by the gas attacks and the remainder is so decimated that the Republican Guard units not only stand a chance, but so outnumber US troops on the ground that they get wiped out like the Brits at Dieppe some sixty odd years ago.

My conclusion is, they knew the weapons weren't there going in. Unless they are even more callous, careless and stupid than I think they are, there is no way they send that small a group in. It would have been a disater the likes of which the US military has never seen.