The N.F.L. owners voted this week to let the billionaire owner of the St. Louis Rams move his team to just outside Los Angeles, a move consistent with this league’s tear-’em-up, toss-’em-out ethos.
The players know this drill. Fall out of favor with a coach? Take too long to recover from an injury? Unless you’re an N.F.L. star, you have a problem.
Garry Gillam, a behemoth of a man, offered a stirring story as he went from an undrafted player to starting at tackle for the Seattle Seahawks. He signed a three-year, $1.5 million contract.
However, if in the next game he misses a few blocks or gets nicked up and his coaches tire of him, Seattle could release him and pay just the guaranteed portion of his contract, which is to say $12,000.
.. The N.F.L. has baroque rules of self-governance, not the least covering how it splits revenue. Owners all share in television and general ticket revenue. But luxury boxes are pure gold, and a team’s owner doesn’t have to share a penny of that revenue with the owners of other teams.
This has led to an arms race, as owners seek to build ever-grander stadiums with ever-more-luxurious boxes.
The West Point Professor Who Contemplated a Coup
The goal of the West is neither territorial nor imperial: it is simply to discredit Islamism and destroy the will of Muslims to fight on its behalf, thereby to make possible, if they allow it, a civilizational coexistence, or, if they will not, to wipe Islamism, and if need be its adherents, from the earth.
.. he has been circulating an article for publication entitled, “Alea Iacta Est: The U.S. Coup of 2017.” The abstract is strewn with thinly-veiled references to President Obama, asking, for example, “What conditions precedent would be required before the American military would be justified in using or threatening force to oust a U.S. president attempting to ‘fundamentally transform the United States of America’?”
Amos Oz: A Time for Traitors
.. every significant political leader in history was called a traitor by many of his own people — Abraham Lincoln, de Gaulle, Gorbachev, Begin, Sadat, Rabin,” the novelist told me. “The day people in this country start calling Netanyahu a traitor I will know that something may change.”
Journalists Should Stop Exalting Loyalty Among Elites
The notion that America benefits when public figures participate honestly in public discourse is core to political journalism. The enterprise makes no sense without it.
For that reason, it is strange to see prominent journalists, notably Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, react to ostensibly forthright critiques of Obama’s policies by expressing shock at the disloyalty of former administration officials, as if the highest loyalty they owe is to the president rather than their countrymen or the truth.
.. The first rule of elites is to avoid criticism of other elites. That is a bad thing.