gehringer_2

Somewhere recently (maybe here) I read a reminder that Erdogan is a Turk and so you don't get anything (like Sweden's admission to NATO) without a good haggle - it's cooked into the culture. Various reports in the twitterverse indicating that apparently the US has figured out that F-16s are the thing to tease to Erdogan with at the bazaar.

Maybe. I tend to think we get no useful response from Putin until he makes his last throw later this year. I think he still thinks he can achieve his maximum goals, that he will have enough troops mobilized by some time after winter to break through Ukrainian defenses. He may be completely delusional in that belief, but short of defeat I'm not sure anyone will persuade him of that.

Producer Price Index report out today - *down* 0.5% https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-producer-prices-fall-more-than-expected-december-2023-01-18/ I would note that I found this reported nowhere that I could find in the NYT, WAPO or DetNews. Inflation is apparently yesterday's news unless it's $7.00 eggs.

And another step - a munition that would allow the Ukrainians to target almost all Russian assets in occupied Eastern Ukraine. The GLSDB is not quite ATACMS, but it's another next step in giving Ukraine's forces more reach and will again force the Russians to reconfigure rear area assets they thought they had moved out of range of Himars.

They tried to grill him for a confession, but he kept rare form in the interview.

yeah - even if the basic strategy can work, the Packers missed on the timing - they were at least two or three years too soon with Love.

If the report is half accurate, it says someone was hacking into other people's e-mail. What would you do with access to someone else's e-mail? Maybe steal various account credentials there? Doesn't seem to make much sense that an assistant FB coach would be involved in relatively low level larceny though - they are pretty well paid, so I have no other immediate guess.

where the heII is Elko?

Aside from Favre and Rodgers another top level team to let their winning QB walk for an understudy would have been SFO under Walsh. They let Montana go because it was time to play Steve Young or he was going to walk. Montana had a couple more good years with KC and got to the play-offs, but Young had more and won a SB for SFO, so it was the right move for them.

They knew he'd already made the team.

TBF, a great corner can do more than that - they also seal the ability to run wide and may even provide the occasional blitz. But any defensive player's impact is always also tied to the team. One DE's impact is largely driven by whether his line-mates are also good enough to make doubling him costly. Likewise the impact of a great corner is driven whether the other side of field is soft enough you never have to throw his way. I still like having a great CB about as much as I like a great DE.

When it happened I assumed Shepherd was a stop gap and that they would eventually go get a pro. Disappointing that they seem to think he is actually up to the task. Or maybe they are too cheap to land a top talent. I get the impression they have drawn the wrong conclusion from the historic success of George Kell and Al Kaline. They were not loved because they were folksy locals, although that did happed to be true, but because they did a good baseball broadcast - even despite Al's questionable elocution.

No doubt. No argument running the scenarios, that's basic. But one of the things that has emerged again with Ukraine is the gulf between our military 'hard' capabilities intelligence resources and our 'soft' or human strategic ones. Not to knock the former, its value is clear. But the human SW questions remain - and I suppose it's been a perenial argument ever since the first satellite was launched about whether we make sufficient effort to get inside our enemys' (and friends') heads to match that to get inside their physical capabilities.

Serious question to the war gamers: Why should the Chinese invade Taiwan when they can strangle it into capitulation instead? " CSIS may have the right analysis but is it the right question? Marine invasion seems to me to be the least likely course of action for Beijng to get what they want.

hate shotouts. There are bad enough always, but really sad when your goaltending is suspect!

We could indeed help Taiwan in every way we are helping Ukraine and it might well make no difference. The decision tree is - or at least could reach quite different levels there. Even if we follow the logic and go to total conventional war with China, and even if we defeat them tactically, can we actually 'hold' Taiwan - or can it hold itself? Or are we looking at Iraq or Afghanistan where we simply can't overcome the proximity of forces we will not be willing to keep fighting forever? IDK - but it's a much more complicated nut to crack than Ukraine - IMHO.

Of course despite what Biden has said, do you think we start sinking Chinese Men-o-War in the Taiwan straight (and risking the sinking of a Bush class carrier or two)? I'm pretty much all in on Ukraine and I still have a lot of reservations about what it makes any sense for us to do in Taiwan. The tactical reality is that Ukraine is defendable against Russia because it shares hundred of miles of resupply border with the rest of Europe. There is a real front there on both ends. If China gets as crazy as Russia (which is still an open question) I'm not sure we can actually 'save' Taiwan even if we want to - it's a way tougher calculus. We can help make Taiwan enough of a porcupine to force the Chinese to re-evaluation the cost and hopefully change their declared intent, but if they are determined anyway????

sure - I would agree chili powder has a more varied highlights with the 'hot' than the crushed pepper - you are just moving the locus of your flavor palate a few thousand miles westward...🍲

meh - Everybody in the military wants a bigger piece of the pie at all times. And every service is immedately in the ear of their most captive media contacts everytime a dollar is being spent with another service. That's procurement politics. Sure if the Army burns stocks that leaves less budget for the navy in theory, but that assumes that the money being spent on Ukraine is not new money, which I will wager most of it turns out to be, so if it had not been spent there, it would not have been spent on new toys for the navy anyway. The US military budget is almost uncomprehendingly large. All the Ukraine expense so far has been pretty much rounding error.

Sure, there are bad actors in Ukraine, it's a nation of 40 million people. And there is always a possibilty that at some point - should Ukraine preserve it's independence, it back slides on the quality of it's civil society. But you can't be paralyzed by every possibility either. The best you can do is look at who is running the store now and how, and all in all they appear to be a reasonable client to support. I'm less impressed with the argument about somehow depleting our military stocks for a Taiwan conflict. Taiwan would look nothing like this. If China moves on Taiwan it will be a total naval blockade to cut them off and force them to capitulate, not a land battle. So the resources in question are going to be those of the US Navy, USAF. not tanks and land warfare equip, and it will be a direct US/Chinese air/naval confrontation rather than client supported warfare as in Ukraine. EDIT: LOL - 84 types faster than I do......

Capsaicin is pretty much Capsaicin regardless of the source?

At the U there are IT policies you can violate, which would put you at risk of Univeristy sanctions, and then of course there are crimes. Something that got elevated from ITS (internal IT) to UMDPSS would seem to be on crimey side but there could be some grey areas - for instance if you used a U account in some way that was an alleged Title IX violation I could see that ending up at UMDPSS.

porn theft?

instant pot has a bit of a long learning curve and you can't trust half of the instructions/recipes you get, but it will grow on you once you get to where you know what it will do without looking everything up. Also great in the summer in an air conditioned kitchen because it wastes almost no heat.

Unlike Mary Sue or Schlissel, Ono has a history of interest in the athletic programs at the Universities he has served. He had a lot to do with the build out of the program at Cincinnati. He's been around the block with coaches before.