gehringer_2

Reports from US intelligence that the Russians are buying artillery shells from N. Korea. The good part is that the clear implication is that China has declined to offer similar support. Russia turns to N. Korea

Definitely some good fun there. Always good when the perspective gets pulled back to the fact that they are, after all, playing-a-game.

It's been decades since I was a child with grandparents from the Middle East, but my memories of what I heard there would say that the 'more than 1st' cousin - meaning *further* away than 1st cousin, was accepted traditional middle eastern practice at least at the turn of the 20th century. I.E. marriage to a 2nd cousin in that culture would not have raised anyone's eyebrows. We are talking 100 yrs ago in what my grandparents thought was normal, but I could see Oz's frame of reference originating from the same place. Are people reading "more than" to mean "closer than"? Is there reason to think that's what he meant? OTOH, the smell thing is just weirdly TMI.

The SCOTUS did away with most 'incompetent counsel' appeal grounds so a MAGA judge has little choice if she wants to avoid a ruling against the Orange Menace that he can't appeal.

yup. Between IT incompetence and costumer service incompetence you get the perfect storm when the customer service you need involves IT. When I worked for Baker Hughes they used to roll your password every 90 days, which everyone would forget about because you didn't get a warning e-mail - you just had to track it yourself. So they put 4 computers in the lobby of Corp HQ in Houston that allowed to you reset your PW. Brilliant - 3/4 the engineering staff was distributed around the world at account sites. So you call tech service because your PW expired and you tell them - I'm in Timbuktu and need my PW reset/unlocked. And no 'effin joke they read back to you from their script: "Have you accessed the PW reset terminals in the lobby?"

I think the bigger issue with the Special master review is that it's fundamentally irrelevant to the likely charges to be filed; at it's base it's just another delaying tactic. Of course if DOJ would go ahead and file some charges that might all get a lot clearer.

No doubt $90/BBL is a price point OPEC would like to support. Prices have been bouncing around that point too much for the Sheiks (or Putin) to be happy. It's ironic that while Iran is busy getting into bed with Putin as an arms supplier, if they do sign a new nuke deal that allows their exports to start heading up, prices probably will not be supportable at $90/bbl and that would be about the cruelest thing they could to Vladdie.

I've just started Kristen Kobes Du Mez' book "Jesus and John Wayne." Not sure where her core thesis is yet, but a lot of it seems to be toxic masculinity plus the profit motive of creating a "Christian" cultural state apart from the mainstream culture (music, film, travel, educational immersion etc). A curious thing is that I bet if you ask a white evangelical what they view as their top overall world threats beyond their domestic librul opposition, you know fundamentalist Islam would be right up there. And yet they share so much world view with their supposed enemy, starting with a society ordered around the power of men to suppress women. But it really shouldn't be that surprising I guess. Any philosophy's most virulent enemy is usually the one only one door down the logical system aisle.

/..sigh../ This is what happens when Law Schools become profit centers for schools with good reps.

I wasn't very clear - I was arguing the opposite. What I was arguing was the analyst/media/talking head consideration of the question of what the cut might be and whether a cut was bigger or smaller than that are both fundamentally political questions and thus the market does not and should not respond to them, but rather only to whatever cut actually was or wasn't made. -and of course to whatever the market judges as the likelihood that any given OPEC pronouncement is actually held to by its members!

I shouldn't laugh as I work in an institution every bit as triggered on all this as this example. The difference is I don't think what happens in academia has that much influence in the outside world and I tend to think reality is that the students are often quite reactionary to the prevailing academic orthodoxy anyway, so academia sows the seeds of an inverse intellectual pendulum swing in each generation.

LOL - on reread - to be honest I did misread you post a little. Your qoute was: I glossed too quickly at "experience at *winning* organizations* and took it as "experience in the organization" as in guys who know what's going on the current system. mea culpa

I will absolutely give Jim Harbaugh full credit as being 100% an advocate for players over programs. Always has been. That's no doubt part of why players come to play for him.

The level of navel gazing in Hollywood can reach some epic proportions. For instance, if you can't laugh over all the fall-out from Tilda Swinton's role in Dr. Strange you need a new sense of humor.

IIRC, One difference would be that Jackson was considered a can't miss prospect when we landed him from the Yankees. I don't know if Akil has ever gotten that level of buzz.

I get that argument that bad coaching shouldn't affect everyone because there are a lot of guys who are self coached to the point where they aren't going to be paying much attention to team coaching anyway and so you should get a distribution of guys having normal years. But on the other hand I also believe there is a team synergy to hitting. The more men on base and the more scoring pressure a team puts on the opposition pitcher, the more that stress should result in improved opportunities for your hitters. I don't know how many BA points it might be worth, but I think the effect is probably real. That said, one of the Tigers' biggest single problems this season is either not swinging at or not barreling up the opposition pitcher's hittable mistakes - I don't know how you explain that.

also lost time to TJ.

Ridiculous windmill tilt since they've all already been reviewed. it would be nice to have a legal system in the US that at least still pretends to be attached to reality.

She's a putz

Don't give a rat's ass about Ethereum but I'm hoping this puts a whole ton of high performance video cards on the market cheap.

the 'expected' cut (or increase) is a basically a political outcome and is driven by political factors. The actual world production/consumption balance is what it is independent of that. If OPEC made a cut that was smaller than expected that is a measure of the political/policy unity inside OPEC vs what was expected of that unity, it doesn't mean (at least in the eyes of traders) that the cut that was made was or wasn't enough to firm up prices. Enough decided it was to increase the price. It's a measure of the artificiality in the stock market that stocks don't behave this way (e.g. if Amazon makes a lot of money, but less than expected, their stock may still fall). But that's the difference between a piece of paper (or digital entry) representing a share of stock, and a real consumable product with real inventory/supply/demand factors responding to price and vice versa.

there was never anything wrong with Al's stated objectives, it was always his execution, and his trading, that left too much to be desired.

IDK, this can cut both ways. I might look at the logic from the opposite direction: Who cares what the Tiger system is now or how it functions? It's a failed system. I want a different organization based on a different model with different function. I don't care about the blueprints of the old house if my objective is to tear it down and build a new one. I guess it comes down to your tolerance for revolution vs evolution. Not to make this political but just to speak to how change works in general, evolution in large orgs like countries is certainly more successful than revolution. I think as orgs get smaller that becomes progressively less true, but I don't really have any insight to which side of the ledger something like an MLB franchise might be on.

Things are not completely hopeless even from this angle. Don't forget, Chris was Mike's right hand for a long time before he passed. He has been moving in baseball management circles for a long time and may well know a good number of people individually well enough to have some impression of them. I think we tend to write off C. I. as some kind of super lightweight because the Tigers have not accomplished anything - and he's not the most polished guy in his presentation, but to keep it in perspective, it would seem that the rest of Ilitch empire has been doing well under his management and it's not been an easy time for any business to navigate, so I have to assume he is not any kind of fool even if he is not a Theo Epstein baseball wise. In short, I don't think C.I. faces any better or worse odds of finding the GM he needs than any other average MLB owner.

In all the years of reading Henning, the only column I ever read where he seemed to actually know something that was not easy conventional wisdom that did end up happening what that they were going to move Granderson. But OTOH, by this point you can chalk that up to the stopped clock being right twice a day since we have learned that Lynn is *always* proposing they move their best players for some new pot of gold, even if it's often mythical.