NFL Draft: Forums, Chat, News, and Mock Drafts. The Best NFL Draft Info on the Net! http://nflfans.com/x Everything NFL: Forums, chat, news, and interactive mocks -- always free. We proudly feature the NFL Draft Exchange, the best draft info on the net! en Thu, 23 May 2013 09:14:32 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.nflfans.com/x/images/styles/graydeluxe/misc/rss.jpg NFL Draft: Forums, Chat, News, and Mock Drafts. The Best NFL Draft Info on the Net! http://nflfans.com/x Rams News Recap for May 22 http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81571&goto=newpost Thu, 23 May 2013 06:30:42 GMT *Rams News Items From May 22 Get Caught Up With Any Rams Articles/Videos You May Have Missed* *Rams QB Sam Bradford: Deadly Moore Tornado Hit Close... Rams News Items From May 22

Get Caught Up With Any Rams Articles/Videos You May Have Missed

Rams QB Sam Bradford: Deadly Moore Tornado Hit Close to Home –NFL.com
Sam Bradford was born and raised in Oklahoma. He lives there to this day, residing in the north section of Oklahoma City. Bradford was at home packing for St. Louis Rams organized team activities when a tornado ripped through the nearby town of Moore, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake.

City of St. Louis, Sam Bradford Launch Donation Drive For Tornado Victims –Video

Top 10 quarterbacks 25 or under: #8 Sam Bradford –NFL.com
Bradford was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 NFL Draft for a reason. (Well, other than the fact the St. Louis Rams badly needed a quarterback and the next QB drafted that year was Tim Tebow.) Bradford came out of Oklahoma known for his accuracy, NFL arm, and smarts.

Rams OLB Ray Ray Armstrong Embraces Opportunity –Wagoner
Ray Ray Armstrong spent the better part of the past year searching.
Searching for a place to play football. Searching for the right fit. Searching for an opportunity, any opportunity that would allow him to pursue his lifelong dream.

Statement on Suspended Rams OG Rokevious Watkins

Rams Brian Quick: Breakout Wide Receiver of the Year? –TST
The St. Louis Rams made a big splash at the wide receiver position during the NFL Draft. Les Snead & Co. moved up eight spots to get the explosive Tavon Austin. His PIC (Partner in Crime) at West Virginia, Stedman Bailey, was subsequently chosen with the team’s second third-round pick.

Rams Make A ‘Big’ Splash With Undrafted Free Agent Signing –TST
The St. Louis Rams added another offensive tackle this week, a big one. The team signed Terrell Brown of Mississippi, who measures a towering 6’10, 388 pounds. That officially makes him one big dude.

Safe to Say Coaches Not Aggressive Enough: Fisher More Than Most –Sando
The “Ground Chuck” nickname for Chuck Knox fit the former NFL coach’s old-school reputation even if it sometimes misrepresented his approach to offensive football.

Coach Rick Venturi Assesses Rams Chances in NFC West –Video ]]> Rams E-Zine Talk Forum RamBill http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81571 Green Energy http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81570&goto=newpost Thu, 23 May 2013 05:15:41 GMT Not for the Eagles though. http://www.foxprovidence.com/dpp/news/us_news/AP-IMPACT-Wind-farms-get-pass-on-eagle-deaths_49069160 Not for the Eagles though.

http://www.foxprovidence.com/dpp/new...eaths_49069160 ]]> The Off-Topic Lounge RsmtFan http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81570 St. Louis+Bradford Start Donation Drive For Tornado Victims http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81569&goto=newpost Thu, 23 May 2013 03:56:22 GMT St. Louis Rams quarterback Sam Bradford, Mayor Francis Slay and community leaders have teamed up to help tornado victims in Oklahoma. They started... St. Louis Rams quarterback Sam Bradford, Mayor Francis Slay and community leaders have teamed up to help tornado victims in Oklahoma.

They started a donation drive called #STL4OKC Sam Bradford told News 4’s Steve Savard he feels compelled to help.

All donated goods can be dropped off Thursday from 4 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. at the Tums lot across from Busch Stadium. Goods can also be donated at the Loughborough or Kirkwood Commons from 7a.m. to 7 p.m.

Watch Sam Talk About Tornado Donation Drive ]]> Rams E-Zine Talk Forum RamBill http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81569 Civilization Without Religion? http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81568&goto=newpost Thu, 23 May 2013 02:34:11 GMT *Civilization Without Religion? (http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/civilization-without-religion/#.UZ2Bo0pZHde)* ... Civilization Without Religion?

by Russell Kirk


Russell Kirk

Sobering voices tell us nowadays that the civilization in which we participate is not long for this world. Many countries have fallen under the domination of squalid oligarchs; other lands are reduced to anarchy. “Cultural revolution,” rejecting our patrimony of learning and manners, has done nearly as much mischief in the West as in the East, if less violently. Religious belief is attenuated at best, for many–or else converted, after being secularized, into an instrument for social transformation. Books give way to television and videos; universities, intellectually democratized, are sunk to the condition of centers for job certification. An increasing proportion of the population, in America especially, is dehumanized by addiction to narcotics and insane sexuality.

These afflictions are only some of the symptoms of social and personal disintegration. One has but to look at our half-ruined American cities, with their ghastly rates of murder and rape, to perceive that we moderns lack the moral imagination and the right reason required to maintain tolerable community. Writers in learned quarterlies or in daily syndicated columns use the terms “post-Christian era” or “post-modern epoch” to imply that we are breaking altogether with our cultural past, and are entering upon some new age of a bewildering character.

Some people, the militant secular humanists in particular, seem pleased by this prospect; but yesteryear’s meliorism is greatly weakened in most quarters. Even Marxist ideologues virtually have ceased to predict the approach of a Golden Age. To most observers, T. S. Eliot among them, it has seemed far more probable that we are stumbling into a new Dark Age, inhumane, merciless, a totalist political domination in which the life of spirit and the inquiring intellect will be denounced, harassed, and propagandized against: Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four, rather than Huxley’s Brave New World of cloying sensuality. Or perhaps Tolkien’s blasted and servile land of Mordor may serve as symbol of the human condition in the twenty-first century (which, however, may not be called the twenty-first century, the tag Anno Domini having been abolished as joined to one of the superstitions of the childhood of the race). 

Some years ago I was sitting in the parlor of an ancient house in the close of York Minster. My host, Basil Smith, the Minster’s Treasurer then, a man of learning and of faith, said to me that we linger at the end of an era; soon the culture we have known will be swept into the dustbin of history. About us, as we talked in that medieval mansion, loomed Canon Smith’s tall bookcases lined with handsome volumes; his doxological clock chimed the half-hour musically; flames flared up in his fireplace. Was all this setting of culture, and much more besides, to vanish away as if the Evil Spirit had condemned it? Basil Smith is buried now, and so is much of the society he ornamented and tried to redeem. At the time I thought him too gloomy; but already a great deal that he foresaw has come to pass.

The final paragraph of Malcolm Muggeridge’s essay ‘The Great Liberal Death Wish” must suffice, the limits of my time with you considered, as a summing-up of the human predicament at the end of the twentieth century.

“As the astronauts soar into the vast eternities of space,” Muggeridge writes, “on earth the garbage piles higher, as the groves of academe extend their domain, their alumni’s arms reach lower, as the phallic cult spreads, so does impotence. In great wealth, great poverty; in health, sickness, in numbers, deception. Gorging, left hungry; sedated, left restless; telling all, hiding all; in flesh united, forever separate. So we press on through the valley of abundance that leads to the wasteland of satiety, passing through the gardens of fantasy; seeking happiness ever more ardently, and finding despair ever more surely.”

Just so. Such recent American ethical writers as Stanley Hauwerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre concur in Muggeridge’s verdict on the society of our time, concluding that nothing can be done, except for a remnant to gather in little “communities of character” while society slides toward its ruin. Over the past half-century, many other voices of reflective men and women have been heard to the same effect. Yet let us explore the question of whether a reinvigoration of our culture is conceivable.

Is the course of nations inevitable? Is there some fixed destiny for great states? In 1796, a dread year for Britain, old Edmund Burke declared that we cannot foresee the future; often the historical determinists are undone by the coming of events that nobody has predicted. At the very moment when some states “seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster ‘ Burke wrote in his First Letter on a Regicide Peace, “they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course, and opened a new reckoning; and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. All this has happened without any apparent previous change in the general circumstances which had brought on their distress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities on a whole nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.”

The “common soldier” to whom Burke refers is Arnold of Winkelreid, who flung himself upon the Austrian spears to save his country; the child is the young Hannibal, told by his father to wage ruthless war upon Rome; the girl at the door of an inn is Joan of Arc. We do not know why such abrupt reversals or advances occur, Burke remarks; perhaps they are indeed the work of Providence.

“Nothing is, but thinking makes it so,” the old adage runs. If most folk come to believe that our culture must collapse-why, then collapse it will. Yet Burke, after all, was right in that dreadful year of 1796. For despite the overwhelming power of the French revolutionary movement in that year, in the long run Britain defeated her adversaries, and after the year 1812 Britain emerged from her years of adversity to the height of her power. Is it conceivable that American civilization, and in general what we call “Western Civilization,” may recover from the Time of Troubles that commenced in 1914 (so Arnold Toynbee instructs us) and in the twenty-first century enter upon an Augustan age of peace and restored order?

To understand these words “civilization” and “culture,” the best book to read is T. S. Eliot’s slim volume Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, published forty-four years ago.

Once upon a time I commended that book to President Nixon, in a private discussion of modern disorders, as the one book which he ought to read for guidance in his high office. Man is the only creature possessing culture, as distinguished from instinct; and if culture is effaced, so is the distinction between man and the brutes that perish. “Art is man’s nature,” in Edmund Burke’s phrase; and if the human arts, or culture, cease to be, then human nature ceases to be.

From what source did humankind’s many cultures arise? Why, from cults. A cult is a joining together for worship-that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power. It is from association in the cult, the body of worshippers, that human community grows. This basic truth has been expounded in recent decades by such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee.

Once people are joined in a cult, cooperation in many other things becomes possible. Common defense, irrigation, systematic agriculture, architecture, the visual arts, music, the more intricate crafts, economic production and distribution, courts and government-all these aspects of a culture arise gradually from the cult, the religious de.

Out of little knots of worshippers, in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, India, or China, there grew up simple cultures; for those joined by religion can dwell together and work together in relative peace. Presently such simple cultures may develop into intricate cultures, and those intricate cultures into great civilizations. American civilization of our era is rooted, strange though the fact may seem to us, in tiny knots of worshippers in Palestine, Greece, and Italy, thousands of years ago. The enormous material achievements of our civilization have resulted, if remotely, from the spiritual insights of prophets and seers.

But suppose that the cult withers, with the elapse of centuries. What then of the culture that is rooted in the cult? What then of the civilization which is the culture’s grand manifestation? For an answer to such uneasy questions, we can turn to a twentieth century parable. Here I think of G. K Chesterton’s observation that all life being an allegory, we can understand it only in parable.

The author of my parable, however, is not Chesterton, but a quite different writer, the late Robert Graves, whom I once visited in Mallorca I have in mind Graves’s romance Seven Days in New Crete-published in America under the title Watch the North Wind Rise.

In that highly readable romance of a possible future, we are told that by the close of the “Late Christian epoch” the world will have fallen altogether, after a catastrophic war and devastation, under a collectivistic domination, a variant of Communism. Religion, the moral imagination, and nearly everything that makes life worth living have been virtually extirpated by ideology and nuclear war. [A] system of thought and government called Logicalism, “pantisocratic economics divorced from any religious or national theory,” rules the world-for a brief time.

In Graves’s words:
Quote:
Logicalism, hinged on international science, ushered in a gloomy and anti-poetic age. It lasted only a generation or two and ended with a grand defeatism, a sense of perfect futility, that slowly crept over the directors and managers of the regime. The common man had triumphed over his spiritual betters at last, but what was to follow? To what could he look forward with either hope or fear? By the abolition of sovereign states and the disarming of even the police forces, war had become impossible. No one who cherished any religious beliefs whatever, or was interested in sport, poetry, or the arts, was allowed to hold a position of public responsibility. “Ice-cold logic” was the most valued civic quality, and those who could not pretend to it were held of no account. Science continued laboriously to expand its over-large corpus of information, and the subjects of research grew more and more beautifully remote and abstract; yet the scientific obsession, so strong at the beginning of the third millennium A. D., was on the wane. Logicalist officials who were neither defeatist nor secretly religious and who kept their noses to the grindstone from a sense of duty, fell prey to colobromania, a mental disturbance….

Rates of abortion and infanticide, of suicide, and other indices of social boredom rise with terrifying speed under this Logicalist regime. Gangs of young people go about robbing, beating, and murdering, for the sake of excitement. It appears that the human race will become extinct if such tendencies continue; for men and women find life not worth living under such a domination. The deeper longings of humanity have been outraged, so that the soul and the state stagger on the verge of final darkness. But in this crisis an Israeli Sophocrat writes a book called A Critique of Utopias, in which he examines seventy Utopian writings, from Plato to Aldous Huxley. “We must retrace our steps,” he concludes, “or perish.” Only by the resurrection of religious faith, the Sophocrats discover, can mankind be kept from total destruction; and that religion, as Graves describes it in his romance, springs from the primitive soil of myth and symbol.
Graves really is writing about our own age, not of some remote future: of life in today’s United States and today’s Soviet Union. He is saying that culture arises from the cult; and that when belief in the cult has been wretchedly enfeebled, the culture will decay swiftly. The material order rests upon the spiritual order.

So it has come to pass, here in the closing years of the twentieth century. With the weakening of the moral order, “Things fall apart; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world … ” The Hellenic and the Roman cultures went down to dusty death after this fashion. What may be done to achieve reinvigoration?

Some well-meaning folk talk of a “civil religion,” a kind of cult of patriotism, founded upon a myth of national virtue and upon veneration of certain historic documents, together with a utilitarian morality. But such experiments of a secular character never have functioned satisfactorily; and it scarcely is necessary for me to point out the perils of such an artificial creed, bound up with nationalism: the example of the ideology of the National Socialist Party in Germany, half a century ago, may suffice. Worship of the state, or of the national commonwealth, is no healthy substitute for communion with transcendent love and wisdom.

Nor can attempts at persuading people that religion is “useful” meet with much genuine success. No man sincerely goes down on his knees to the divine because he has been told that such rituals lead to the beneficial consequences of tolerably honest behavior in commerce. People will conform their actions to the precepts of religion only when they earnestly believe the doctrines of that religion to be true.

Still less can it suffice to assert that the Bible is an infallible authority on everything, literally interpreted, in defiance of the natural sciences and of other learned disciplines; to claim to have received private revelations from Jehovah; or to embrace some self-proclaimed mystic from the gorgeous East, whose teachings are patently absurd.

In short, the culture can be renewed only if the cult is renewed; and faith in divine power cannot be summoned up merely when that is found expedient. Faith no longer works wonders among us: one has but to glance at the typical church built nowadays, ugly and shoddy, to discern how architecture no longer is nurtured by the religious imagination. It is so in nearly all works of twentieth century civilization: the modern mind has been secularized so thoroughly that “culture” is assumed by most people to have no connection with the love of God.

How are we to account for this widespread decay of the religious impulse? It appears that the principal cause of the loss of the idea of the holy is the attitude called “scientism”-that is, the popular notion that the revelations of natural science, over the past century and a half or two centuries, somehow have proved that men and women are naked apes merely, that the ends of existence are production and consumption merely; that happiness is the gratification of sensual impulses; and that concepts of the resurrection of the flesh and the life everlasting are mere exploded superstitions. Upon these scientistic assumptions, public schooling in America is founded nowadays, implicitly.

This view of the human condition has been called-by C S. Lewis, in particular-reductionism: it reduces human beings almost to mindlessness; it denies the existence of the soul. Reductionism has become almost an ideology. It is scientistic, but not scientific: for it is a far cry from the understanding of matter and energy that one finds in the addresses of Nobel prize winners in physics, say.

Popular notions of “what science says” are archaic :, reflecting the assertions of the scientists of the middle of the nineteenth century; such views are a world away from the writings of Stanley Jaki, the cosmologist and historian of science, who was awarded the Templeton Prize for progress in religion last year.

As Arthur Koestler remarks in his little book The Roots of Coincidence, yesterday’s scientific doctrines of materialism and mechanism ought to be buried now with a requiem of electronic music. Once more, in biology as in physics, the scientific disciplines enter upon the realm of mystery.

Yet the great public always suffers from the affliction called cultural lag. If most people continue to fancy that scientific theory of a century ago is the verdict of serious scientists today, will not the religious understanding of life continue to wither, and civilization continue to crumble?

Perhaps; but the future, I venture to remind you, is unknowable. Conceivably we may be given a Sign. Yet such an event being in the hand of God, if it is to occur at all, meanwhile some reflective people declare that our culture must be reanimated, by a great effort of will.

More than forty years ago, that remarkable historian Christopher Dawson, in his book Religion and Culture, expressed this hard truth strongly. “The events of the last few years,” Dawson wrote, “portend either the end of human history or a turning point in it. They have warned us in letters of fire that our civilization has been tried in the balance and found wanting-that there is an absolute limit to the progress than can be achieved by the perfectionment of scientific techniques detached from spiritual aims and moral values…. The recovery of moral control and the return to spiritual order have become the indispensable conditions of human survival. But they can be achieved only by a profound change in the spirit of modern civilization. This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which has existed at every age and on every level of human development.”

Amen to that. The alternative to such a successful endeavor, a conservative endeavor, to reinvigorate our culture would be a series of catastrophic events, the sort predicted by Pitirim Sorokin and other sociologists, which eventually might efface our present sensate culture and bring about a new ideational culture, the character of which we cannot even imagine. Such an ideational culture doubtless would have its religion: but it might be the worship of what has been called the Savage God.

Such ruin has occurred repeatedly in history. When the classical religion ceased to move hearts and minds, two millennia ago, thus the Graeco Roman civilization went down to Avernus. As my little daughter Cecilia put it unprompted, some years ago looking at a picture book of Roman history, “And then, at the end of a long summer’s day, there came Death, Mud, Crud.”

Great civilizations have ended in slime. Outside the ancient city of York, where York Minster stands upon the site of the Roman praetorium, there lies a racecourse known as the Knavesmire. Here in medieval time were buried the knaves-the felons and paupers. When, a few years ago, the racecourse was being enlarged, the diggers came upon a Roman graveyard beneath, or in part abutting upon, the medieval burial ground. This appeared to have been a cemetery of the poor of Romano-British times. Few valuable artifacts were uncovered, but the bones were of interest. Many of the people there interred, in the closing years of Roman power in Britain, had been severely deformed, apparently suffering from rickets and other afflictions-deformed spines and limbs and skulls. Presumably they had suffered lifelong, and died, from extreme malnutrition. At the end, decadence comes down to that, for nearly everybody.

It was at York that the dying Septimius Severus, after his last campaign (against the Scots), was asked by his brutal sons, Geta and Caracalla, “Father, when you are gone, how shall we govern the empire?” The hard old emperor had his laconic reply ready: “Pay the soldiers. The rest do not matter.” There would come a time when the soldiers could not be paid, and then civilization would fall to pieces. The last Roman army in Italy-it is said to have been composed entirely of cavalry- fought in league with the barbarian general Odoacer against Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, in the year 491; on Odoacer’s defeat, the Roman soldiers drifted home, nevermore to take arms: the end of an old song. Only the earlier stages of social decadence-seem liberating to some people; the last act, as Cecilia Kirk perceived, consists of Death, Mud, Crud.

In short, it appears to me that our culture labors in an advanced state of decadence; that what many people mistake for the triumph of our civilization actually consists of powers that are disintegrating our culture; that the vaunted “democratic freedom” of liberal society in reality is servitude to appetites and illusions which attack religious belief; which destroy community through excessive centralization and urbanization; which efface life-giving tradition and custom.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.

So Gerontion instructs us, in T. S. Eliot’s famous grim poem. By those and some succeeding lines, Eliot means that human experience lived without the Logos, the Word; lived merely by the asserted knowledge of empirical science-why, history in that sense is a treacherous gypsy witch. Civilizations that reject or abandon the religious imagination must end, as did Gerontion, in fractured atoms.

In conclusion, it is my argument that the elaborate civilization we have known stands in peril; that it may expire of lethargy, or be destroyed by violence, or perish, from a combination of both evils. We who think that life remains worth living ought to address ourselves to means by which a restoration of our culture may be achieved. A prime necessity for us is to restore an apprehension of religious insights in our clumsy apparatus of public instruction, which -bullied by militant secular humanists and presumptuous federal courts-has been left with only ruinous answers to the ultimate questions.

What ails modern civilization? Fundamentally, our society’s affliction is the decay of religious belief. If a culture is to survive and flourish, it must not be severed from the religious vision out of which it arose. The high necessity of reflective men and women, then, is to labor for the restoration of religious teachings as a credible body of doctrine.

“Redeem the time; redeem the dream,” T. S. Eliot wrote. It remains possible, given right reason and moral imagination, to confront boldly the age’s disorders. The restoration of true learning, humane and scientific; the reform of many public policies; the renewal of our awareness of a transcendent order, and of the presence of an Other, the brightening of the comers where we find ourselves such approaches are open to those among the rising generation who look for a purpose in life. It is just conceivable that we may be given a Sign before the end of the twentieth century; yet Sign or no Sign, Remnant must strive against the follies of the time.



Books on or by Dr. Kirk, including the book Eliot and His Age, may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Essays on or by Dr. Kirk may be found here.

Given at the Heritage Foundation, lecture Number Four Hundred and Four, July 24th, 1992 ]]> The Off-Topic Lounge ibleedgreen http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81568 welcome HERD http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81567&goto=newpost Thu, 23 May 2013 02:15:49 GMT post on if you like or you can read RamBills updates. Troys working on the forum. I have no updates yet. post on if you like or you can read RamBills updates.

Troys working on the forum. I have no updates yet. ]]> Rams E-Zine Talk Forum Shaky http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81567 Scared of the future? http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81566&goto=newpost Thu, 23 May 2013 01:29:04 GMT *Are you people scared? The guy is a college coach until now, and we Falcons fans are familiar with the Oregon type offenses. Remember Chris... Are you people scared?

The guy is a college coach until now, and we Falcons fans are familiar with the Oregon type offenses. Remember Chris Miller?

Today on the NFLN there was a question raised,...which team goes from worst to first, the Chiefs or the Eagles. I laughed OUT LOUD! There was Andy Reid and then Kelly's pictures and as the blabbering went on ya just had to sink your face in your hands and laugh. The NFLN is a joke. Always catering to Jets and Giants fans they do. With some love to the iggles.

Everyone knows Kelly's offense. And honestly it's where lots of Pro offenses are going. Spread the field to allow running lanes but with Kelly, like Bobby Petrino, they think pass first regardless what they say. That was the allure with Petrino back in 2007 with the Falcons. Bobby always talked up having a big back to pound the ball but he had Warrick Dunn. That's enough to make anyone laugh.

Falcons fans analyzed Petrino's offense before 2007 and myself deemed it potent and it was! But only in the passing game. The 2007 Falcons offense lacked run blocking so,...the 2013 iggles should be good there,...but we aren't hearing from iggles fans and I know why,...they're scared of the unknown.

The NFL changes every season and in the past college coaches have failed other than Jimmy J and maybe Carroll,...his fate is yet to be revealed. Kelly might have a key to some wins.

But where are iggles fans talking about this new offense? ]]> Birds of the East Penumbra http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81566 <![CDATA[Andy Reid's lagacy]]> http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81565&goto=newpost Thu, 23 May 2013 00:05:23 GMT http://www.cbc.ca/sports/football/story/2008/05/07/reid-son.html Such a shame two boys living in luxury turned to drugs. So goes a father, so goes... http://www.cbc.ca/sports/football/st.../reid-son.html

Such a shame two boys living in luxury turned to drugs. So goes a father, so goes his football team. ]]> SuperBirds of the South Penumbra http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81565 General Videla and the War on Terror http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81564&goto=newpost Wed, 22 May 2013 23:31:22 GMT
Those who look at the horrors of Argentina under Videla’s junta and think, “It can’t happen here,” are only fooling themselves.


http://wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/...tml?view=print


Quote:
He was, after all, a pioneer in the “war on terrorism,” writing the textbook on methods of extra-constitutional rule, repression and state violence that have been largely embraced by ruling circles in Washington and elsewhere. Undoubtedly, there are those engaged in this line of work today who see him as something of a visionary.

Three days before his death, the ex-dictator appeared as the principal defendant before an Argentine court hearing charges relating to Operation Condor, a joint endeavor by Latin America’s ruling dictatorships of the 1970s to hunt down and murder one another’s opponents, wherever they might be found.

As in previous trials, Videla claimed a loss of memory about the events of that period, while unconditionally defending the actions taken by his regime and the military as necessary in an “anti-terrorist war.”

Operation Condor involved the combined efforts of military regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, with indispensable logistical support and military aid from the Pentagon and the CIA.

It resulted in the abduction and murder of a number of individuals seen as opponents of the dictatorial regimes. This included the Washington, DC car bomb killing of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean foreign minister in the Allende government, the assassinations of former Bolivian president Juan José Torres and former Uruguayan deputies Héctor Gutiérrez and Zelmar Michelini in Buenos Aires, and the assassinations of former Brazilian presidents Joao Goulart and Juscelino Kubitschek, whose deaths were made to appear, respectively, as a heart attack and a car accident.

In official US parlance, the methods employed under Condor are known as “rendition” and “targeted assassinations.” They would be well understood by today’s CIA and special operations personnel.

All of the Condor regimes were staffed by senior military personnel who had been trained at the Army’s School of the Americas in Panama and other US military facilities, and all of them had US military advisers, received substantial US military aid, and hosted well-staffed CIA stations.

Previously secret State Department documents make it clear that Washington understood Videla’s intentions from the beginning and fully supported them. One of these documents records an exchange between then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his assistant secretary of state for Latin America, William Rogers, two days after Videla seized power.

Rogers told Kissinger that Washington must “expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long. I think they’re going to have to come down not only on the terrorists but on the dissidents of trade unions and their parties.”

While Rogers suggested delaying official recognition of the junta out of public relations concerns, Kissinger ordered full US support. “Whatever chance they have,” he stressed, “they will need a little encouragement from us.”

Among those involved in implementing this policy in 1976 were Richard Cheney, then the White House chief of staff, and Donald Rumsfeld, who was defense secretary. Twenty five years later, both would reemerge as principal architects of the US “global war on terror.”

With Washington’s blessing, Videla and his fellow officers set about what they dubbed the “process of national reorganization,” or el proceso.

Among its first steps was the suspension of basic democratic rights, including habeas corpus guarantees against imprisonment without charges or trials. The dictatorship outlawed unions and political parties and disbanded the legislature. Strikes and protests were turned into grave crimes against “national security.”

A network of clandestine prisons was set up, including the notorious dungeons of ESMA (the Navy School of Mechanics), the army’s Campo de Mayo, and scores of others scattered across the country. There, detainees were subjected to vicious forms of torture, including beatings, electric shocks, prolonged submersion in foul water, forced denial of sleep, extreme temperature and noise, attacks by trained dogs, simulated executions and sexual torture and humiliation.

Virtually all of these methods came into common usage at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and CIA “black sites” across the globe a quarter of a century later.

After being subjected to torture, the great majority of the victims were murdered, many of them drugged, loaded onto military aircraft and dropped naked to drown in the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean.

The positive attitude of the US military toward the junta was reflected in an article appearing in the June 1978 edition of Parameters, the journal of the US Army War College, which noted approvingly that “General Jorge Rafael Videla, who heads Argentina’s military junta, has permitted the authorities to adopt more rigorous measures” against “terrorism.” It praised Videla as a “moderate committed to returning the country to democracy once the foundations have been established for stability.”

By this time, as one of the declassified State Department documents revealed, the official estimate of the number of Argentines murdered in this crusade for “stability” stood at 22,000.

Fully 40 percent of the junta’s victims were militant workers and union members. Torture centers were set up inside some of the country’s major factories, including a Ford auto plant. The Peronist union bureaucracy collaborated in this extermination campaign, helping to form death squads even before the military took power.

The repression had definite class and economic aims. The dictatorship managed to cut wages in half within its first year, reducing workers’ share of the national income from 48.5 percent to only 29 percent. Universal health care was abolished in favor of for-profit insurance companies, and other forms of social assistance were eliminated or drastically curtailed. In essence, the junta oversaw a vast transfer of social wealth from Argentine working people to the country’s ruling class, the transnational corporations and international finance capital.

This is not merely a matter of historical interest. Faced with the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the ruling establishments in the US and internationally are attempting to effect a similar transfer of social wealth today. And, under the mantle of a “war on terror”—the same justification given by Videla—the US government, beginning with the Bush administration and accelerating under Obama, has already put in place the legal and institutional framework for Argentine-style repression.
]]> The Off-Topic Lounge Gundermerikan http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81564 Islamist psychos hack soldier to death in the streets of London in broad daylight http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81563&goto=newpost Wed, 22 May 2013 23:19:40 GMT Hmmm, think they are becoming more emboldened? Wonder... Hmmm, think they are becoming more emboldened? Wonder why?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...or-attack.html

]]> The Off-Topic Lounge ibleedgreen http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81563 Top 10 quarterbacks 25 or under: #8 Sam Bradford/NFL.com http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81562&goto=newpost Wed, 22 May 2013 23:04:04 GMT *Top 10 quarterbacks 25 or under: #8 Sam Bradford* By Gregg Rosenthal Around The League Editor Published: May 22, 2013 at 05:49... Top 10 quarterbacks 25 or under: #8 Sam Bradford

By Gregg Rosenthal
Around The League Editor
Published: May 22, 2013 at 05:49 p.m.

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap100...r-sam-bradford

This is the age of the young quarterback. Buoyed by the draft class of 2012, we have a surplus of promising young signal-callers. Around The League and "NFL Total Access" will count down the top 10 quarterbacks 25 or under we'd want leading our franchise.

No. 8: Sam Bradford, St. Louis Rams

Why he's here

Bradford was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 NFL Draft for a reason. (Well, other than the fact the St. Louis Rams badly needed a quarterback and the next QB drafted that year was Tim Tebow.) Bradford came out of Oklahoma known for his accuracy, NFL arm, and smarts. After three years and 42 starts, Bradford as a pro is tougher to define.

Evaluating Bradford was harder than any quarterback on this list because of the lack of players around him and his offensive system in 2012. Bradford has played for three dramatically different offenses in three seasons. Blaming the surrounding talent is often a cheap excuse because you can isolate quarterback play, but Bradford's supporting cast often masked solid performances.

The arm strength is still there. And despite the Rams' often frustrating station-to-station offense under coordinator Brian Schottenheimer, Bradford enjoyed his best season in 2012. The play below is a nice example of Bradford's ability to throw on the move and use his natural velocity.

Bradford threw 21 touchdown passes and 13 interceptions last season, raising his YPA dramatically to 6.7. You had to squint, but there was real progress in 2012. Just not enough to satisfy many Rams fans.

Why he's not higher

It's fair to say Bradford has not elevated the play of those around him. In 2011 especially, he appeared shell-shocked because of all the pressure he saw. Early pressure often was a problem last season, but timing with his young receiver crew was the bigger issue. The Rams did not have receivers that could win against press man coverage, which especially killed them on third downs. Even when his receivers won, Bradford often threw behind wideouts on slant routes.

Perhaps Bradford's biggest issue is the toughest to evaluate for an outsider. Greg Cosell of NFL Films would call it "seeing the field clearly." On plays Bradford got the right protection and what he wanted out of the coverage, he often hesitated. This led to dump-off passes when the play design called for more. The first play in the package below is an example of what I mean:

The Rams rely on option routes, which require Bradford and his receiver to be on the same page. I saw a ton of broken-off routes and passes to nowhere. Bradford and his young wideouts, especially the promising Chris Givens, often saw the field differently. The second play above illustrates that. This is understandable in a new offense, but it's something Bradford must overcome this year.

All of the different systems and numerous hits appear to have slowed down Bradford's processing. Hopefully a second year in Schottenheimer's system speeds things up.

Bradford's floor

The talking point around Bradford this season says it's a make or break year. His salary explodes in 2014, but I still don't buy the argument. Even if Bradford stagnated, are the Rams really going to give up on him now with everything they have invested? They passed on Robert Griffin III for him.

The only scenario where Bradford isn't a Ram next year would be if the team bottoms out and the Rams falls in love with a rookie quarterback. That's hard to imagine. The Rams have a dynamic defensive roster that will keep them in almost every game. And Bradford showed signs of emerging last season. He made a ton of huge plays in both contests against the San Francisco 49ers, saving his best throws for when the game was on the line. He also showed far better pocket toughness than I expected over the course of the season.

Bradford delivered a lot of very good passes just before getting smacked around last year. His receivers didn't always make the catch, but Bradford didn't flinch. He stood tall and showed he can deliver with bodies around him. Bradford's going to be an NFL starter for a long time. I'd be surprised if that didn't play out primarily in St. Louis.

Bradford's five-year ceiling

The Rams' defense and coaching staff will give Bradford a chance to start winning playoff games sooner than later. But there's also no denying he's well behind in his development compared to players that reach elite status. Most established top-10 quarterbacks showed more by this point in their career.

Bradford seems to be just missing something, but it's hard to put a finger on what that something is. He's often at his best in the two-minute drill and when he lets the ball rip on a double move like the touchdown to the right to Chris Givens.

A career like another former No. 1 overall pick that finally emerged, Alex Smith, wouldn't be a shock. I think Bradford has an even better chance to raise his game to an Eli-like level where he's always only one crazy playoff run away from immortality. ]]> Rams E-Zine Talk Forum RamBill http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81562 TOTJ - Biggest surprise player on the 2013 Jets. http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81561&goto=newpost Wed, 22 May 2013 20:47:09 GMT http://turnonthejets.com/2013/05/turn-on-the-jets-roundtable-new-york-jets-surprise-edition/#more-14629 http://turnonthejets.com/2013/05/tur...on/#more-14629 ]]> J-E-T-S Addicts! ret2ski http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81561 <![CDATA[Ouch - the downside of OTA's.]]> http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81560&goto=newpost Wed, 22 May 2013 20:30:18 GMT Crabtree (Achilles') underwent surgery Weds

Michael Crabtree underwent surgery on his torn Achilles' Wednesday, and is expected to be sidelined a minimum of six months.

The 49ers aren't messing around with their No. 1 receiver. Many have pointed to Terrell Suggs and Da'Quan Bowers' 2012 mid-season returns from spring Achilles' injuries as hope for Crabtree's 2013, but they are pass rushers required to do far less cutting than Crabtree does as a receiver. In a best-case scenario, Crabtree will likely begin the year on injured reserve/designated for return with an eye toward returning in the playoffs. It's almost certainly going to be a lost year for a player coming off a breakout campaign.

Source: Chris Mortensen on Twitter ]]> J-E-T-S Addicts! ret2ski http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81560 Opinion: John Idzik is staying quiet and handling the Mike Goodson issue perfectly http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81559&goto=newpost Wed, 22 May 2013 20:26:55 GMT Opinion: John Idzik is staying quiet and handling the Mike Goodson issue perfectly May 22nd, 2013 Corey Griffin, theJetsBlog.com There will come... Opinion: John Idzik is staying quiet and handling the Mike Goodson issue perfectly

May 22nd, 2013
Corey Griffin, theJetsBlog.com

There will come a time when we look back on the John Idzik era and map out a pattern of behavior. It might take a year or two — or maybe even three or four — but eventually, there will be an obvious road map for how he handles troublesome decisions.

Unfortunately for Jets fans and the ravenous mainstream media, Idzik’s tire tracks are far too light right now to spell out Mike Goodson’s fate.

Mike GoodsonOne thing is certain: Goodson, one of Idzik’s first budget-conscious signings as Jets general manager, put his new boss in a highly-unenviable position after being arrested on drug and weapon charges late last week.

The immediate call from the peanut gallery was resounding in its similarity: “Cut him! Cut him now!”

Thankfully, Idzik stuck to the motto he’s quietly crafted during his first few months on the job. He’s exercised patience, and the team released a statement saying they were waiting for the legal process to “run its course.”

To which I say, bravo, John. Bravo.

There are far too many questions in Goodson’s case for the Jets to even consider a snap judgment. Earlier this week, Goodson’s lawyer, Tony Fusco, said his client plans to plead not guilty to every charge. Fusco even said he’s confident they can prove the gun found in the car doesn’t belong to Goodson, which could negate the two most serious charges: unlawful possession of a gun and possession of hollow-point ammunition.

Neither Goodson nor Garant Evans, who was driving the car, claim to own the weapon and the police were still searching gun registries for the owner. The gun could be unregistered. It could be stolen. It could be legal. It could be licensed by either man or another person entirely in a state that’s not New Jersey. But it must be stated right now that no one can say it is Goodson’s gun – at least not yet.

Even if that charge is unwritten or invalidated, Goodson still faces several others, including possession of of marijuana. But, if marijuana is the reason you want Goodson gone, then you’re probably watching the wrong league.

Mike GoodsonProfessional athletes, including NFL players, smoke weed — not all of them — but certainly some of them. There are plenty of reasons they do it: be it stress, pain, addiction or pleasure. Am I justifying it? No. But the NFL is far from a substance-free sport. If you’re only interested in a clean game, I suggest you find a little league nearby.

None of this does anything to change the idea that Goodson put himself in an incredibly stupid and dangerous position. He made several mistakes and he might end up in jail because of it, but the legal situation must play out before any decisions are made by the Jets or by the NFL.

Some may point to Idzik’s decision to cut Cliff Harris and Claude Davis the day after they were pulled over and arrested on charges of marijuana possession. Coincidentally, there was a third man in the vehicle who was in possession of handgun, loaded with a single hollow-point bullet – eerily similar to the circumstances surrounding Goodson’s arrest, but not the same.

For one, Harris has an arrest history, having been kicked out of Oregon after racking up 11 traffic citations and being cited for marijuana possession. Goodson has no such history, even if some reporters say they were concerns about his character, when the Jets signed him this spring.

Also, and this is not to be dismissed, but Harris and Davis were fringe roster players likely to get cut at the start of training camp, or at some point during the summer. Assuming he remains on the team, Goodson is going to compete for starting snaps at running back. Scoff at it if you want, but talent rules in the NFL. Teams will often look the other way if the situation can be swept under the rug in order to keep a player they think can help the team win games.

Whether you think that should be the way of the world is another conversation entirely.

The fact is the Jets cannot make a decision based purely on public perception or the demands of a media or fan base still using the word “circus” to depict an organization that’s changed its entire front office, a large percentage of the coaching staff and a good chunk of its work force.

Goodson might get cut after all is said and done. He might end up in jail. He might end up on probation or pay a fine for a marijuana possession charge. We don’t know. The only thing we do know is that Idzik has made it a point to be deliberate, measured and patient and that shouldn’t change because the morality police have decided to picket Florham Park. ]]> J-E-T-S Addicts! ret2ski http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81559 The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot, by Russell Kirk http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81558&goto=newpost Wed, 22 May 2013 20:23:39 GMT Some excerpts from today's reading:

https://kindle.amazon.com/work/the-c...J14/B002CJM6CC

Quote:
Principle is right reason expressed in permanent form; abstraction is its corruption. Expedience is wise application of general knowledge to particular circumstances; opportunism is its degradation. One arrives at principle through comprehension of nature and history, looked upon as manifestations of divine purpose; one acquires prudence by patient observation and cautious investigation, and it becomes the director, the regulator, the standard" of all the virtues. Expedience implements principle, but never supplants principle. For principle is our expression of cognizance of providential purpose.

...


History (and Burke's historical knowledge was respected by Gibbon and Hume) is the gradual revelation of a supreme design-often shadowy to our blinking eyes, but subtle, resistless, and beneficent. God makes history through the agency of man. Burke has no tinge of Hegel's Categorical-Imperative determinism, for Burke, faithful to the Christian doctrine of free will, says history is directed not by an arbitrary, unreasoning urge, but by human character and conduct. Providence works in natural ways. It may be impious to resist this grand design, if its direction is clearly to be seen; but a full comprehension of God's ends seldom is within our powers.

...


Habit and custom may be the wisdom of unlettered men, but they come from the sound ancient heart of humanity. Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride.
]]> The Off-Topic Lounge ibleedgreen http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81558 Sanchez throws three INTs, Smith also struggles at Jets workouts http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81557&goto=newpost Wed, 22 May 2013 19:45:42 GMT Sanchez throws three INTs, Smith also struggles at Jets workouts

By BRIAN COSTELLO
May 22, 2013

There was a familiar sight during the Jets' first practice open to the media – Mark Sanchez throwing interceptions.

Sanchez threw three picks during the session Wednesday, kicking off the competition with rookie Geno Smith for the starting job. Neither quarterback looked good and the entire offense looked dismal.

Sanchez went 6-for-11 with three picks and one sack, while Smith completed 3-of-10 passes with one interception and a sack. Top receivers Santonio Holmes and Stephen Hill did not practice due to recovery from surgeries, leaving both quarterbacks working with a cast of unproven and inexperienced receivers, which led to some of the problems.

"I've got to be confident in what I'm doing, know I'm making the right decisions, putting the ball in the right spot," Sanchez said. "If the guy's there or not there, I can't fix that. I've just got to be on my game and trust that the coaches and everybody will see that and they will."

Sanchez was intercepted on an overthrow by cornerback Antonio Cromartie, a forced throw by defensive lineman Damon Harrison and a throw into double coverage by safety Jaiquan Jarrett. Smith's lone interception was on a tipped pass that appeared to hit the ground but was ruled an interception by linebacker Garrett McIntyre.

"A couple of those throws I want back," Sanchez said. "Of all people, freakin' Snacks (Harrison), that's like your worst nightmare. But I was just trying to make a play, that's one of those things where I should pull the ball down and run or something. I'm shaking the rust off a little bit, getting back into the swing of things, especially with a lot of young guys."

Sanchez seems genuinely enthused about new offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg's system.

"I just really feel like this coaching staff will get the best out of me," he said.

He said he's not worrying about the competition, his first since his rookie year.

"I don't know if it feels different," he said. "I'm competing against the defense. I'm competing to make plays and get first downs. It's not like Geno's on the other side of the field and we're throwing the ball against each other. I don't really think about it that way. I've played long enough now that I don't really worry about the quarterback on the other side of the field or the quarterback in competition with you. It just doesn't really bother me."

Sanchez and Smith took just about the same number of reps. Sanchez worked with the first team. Matt Simms worked with the third team and Greg McElroy with the fourth. … Holmes was on the field but did not participate. He had foot surgery last October. DT Antonio Garay, CB Dee Milliner and WR Jordan White also did not practice. G Willie Colon did not do team drills. ]]> J-E-T-S Addicts! ret2ski http://nflfans.com/x/showthread.php?t=81557