gehringer_2

sounds about right

I think Europe - including Germany - was aware in 1939 that the US had achieved economic and military power sufficient to swing any war it entered. But it wasn't only Japan but England that crossed up Hitler's hope of keeping the US out of the war. Hitler didn't really want England in the war either - firstly because he thought that having gone to war with and defeated England's historical enemy - France, that England would become his natural ally, and also because he knew the bond between the US and England could pull the US into the war if England would not make peace. But Hitler misunderstood the nature of English/French history - that from the Normans on down the English/French wars were as much royal family feuds as the kind of deeper religious/ethnic hatreds of Eastern Europe and thus a France threatened from the East became an imperative for England to fight for rather than abandon. Alternative history is always pure speculation, but even if Pearl Harbor had not happened, it seems plausible to me that the German and US Navies would eventually have come to blows in the Atlantic sufficent to have resulted in the US entering the war there if it hadn't in the Pacific. And likely the ETO would have come to resolution that much faster if the US had not been fighting on both halves of the world.

I will say up front I know nothing about Vick, didn't follow and don't care about his situation. So the following may or may not have anything to do with him. That stipulation made, I believe that it's not uncommon for decent people to get pulled into or just grow up in cultures where things seem 'normal' from the inside that are most definitely not considered normal on the outside and often those people end up perfectly happy to move out of their old culture and into a new one once it opens to them. Which to my mind is what 'rehabilitation' , when successful, is often about.

the Russian system is just not well thought out. The system of training new cadres inside operational units is always going to fall apart once those units are deployed and under stress.

one of the takes I've seen today is that Putin is getting pressure from both the dove and hawk side, but sees the threat from hawk side as more politically dangerous, thus a mobilization despite the Russian Army infrastructure likely being incapable of effectively using it.

Sort of but to a different purpose. Believe it or not, prior to about maybe 1970-something, you could by a house *with the mortgage* that was already on it. IOW, come in with enough principle to pay off the current owner's equity and just *assume* his mortgage in place. It was quite common practice. The idea being that mortgages were so unitform, rates so constant and the terms all so similar, it wasn't worth anyone's time to originate a new loan exactly the same as the old loan.....

this one has been floating around since May. I will tell you this, he has pain in his right leg. In the last year I've yet to see video or pics of him where he wasn't unweighting his right leg when he was standing. Now that could be as non-life threatening as a little sciatica, but it's easy to see once you notice it.

does anyone remember 'assumable' mortgages?

IDK, I think it was more an ego gesture - "I am going to show just how much the Tigers are playing with the big boys on the coasts by writing just as big a contract as any they would..." It's not like Cabrera was going to end up destitute on the street if his patron saint didn't take some special measures to take care of him - he was already a millionaire times over from the previous deal.

too depressing to think about the comparison of outrage generated by abuse of dogs vs abuse of poor people......

Putin's complete lack of command of military strategy and operations has been quite the revelation. The last thing an army that can't do logistics for the soldiers it has is....more soldiers to do logistics for. He demonstrates no useful insight into how and why his army is losing. Good.

Javy's K rate is the second lowest of his career, at 25.3%. Team average is 24.3, league average is 21.9. It would be nice if he struck out less, that's true of everyone. But Javy's real productivity issue this year is not that he is K'ing more than his usual amount or even that much more than the rest of the team, it's his HR rate. His K's just look worse than other guys'.

ask not for whom the bell tolls....

1st game of the season, young D-line, star rookie DE - everyone amped up to beat their man - probably not quite enough attention to discipline, working together and maintaining contain. I think that is the kind of thing that can/should improve next time they see a guy like that.

The part that doesn't work is that if the wall is going to be that far back, it should only be 8' so you could still get leaping plays in front of it, but it would have cost a lot more to lower the stands than to just take out a few rows of seats.

TBH, a couple of years ago Al spent a good deal of time talking about the need to instill more zone awareness/discipline in the Tigers system. Wanting to do it is the easy part - drafting and developing to do it is a lot harder. Also to be honest the Tigers have had some recent success stories with MiLB players improving their K rates: Meadows, Lipcius, Carpenter, and some disappointments on the same score - Workman comes to mind.....

Manning living dangerously in the first - Baddoo picks one off the wall for him.

another one bites the dust.. https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-aviation-scientist-anatoly-gerashchenko-falls-to-his-death-in-latest-plunge-mystery

Tigers have some pitching. They are so bad record-wise I think we tend to underestimate it, but the system is in pretty good shape arm wise even if Mize ends up a miss. The hitting is the problem. Greene has held his own. Tork looks good in his second tour, Baez should be over his adjustment issues. That's one third of a line-up and that is a long way from being competitive. They have a couple more promising bats in the system in Meadows and Crouch. And then a big wild card in Austin Meadows. And almost no trade capital. A lot of work to do. Still, I would expect a GM who actually does immediately upgrade the team's ability to make more intelligent and strategic personnel decisions coupled to the Ilitch resources *should* be able to get this team next year at least to where it was supposed to be this year - which is to say - watchable again.

yup - very very old school slur - but Trump is old.

Jerome Powell is probably hoping she announces a Trump indictment ten minutes after the Fed make their announcement.

Decoding that: "Just because we don't don't even actually have an immigration problem in Fla, damn if that's going to stop me from cashing in on MAGA immigration hysteria."

hope for AJ's sake that Harris is as impressed with him......

so where will Harris rate on the "zero-to-Yzerman" scale for up and comers?

but Chris Ilitch doesn't know anything or anybody....