gehringer_2

This was written by John LeCarre 40yrs ago in 1980. It's stuck in my head ever since. It's a scene placed at night at the site the assassinated body of an old retired agent. The police inspector is walking LeCarre's spymaster - George Smiley, through the crime scene. "Most people expect to be shot in the chest really, don't they, sir?" the Superintendent remarked brightly. He had learned that small talk sometimes eased the atmosphere on such occasions. "Your neat round bullet that drills a tasteful hole. That's what most people expect. Victim falls gently to his knees to the the tune of celestial choirs. It's the Telly that does it, I suppose. Whereas you real bullet these days can take off an arm or leg, so my friend in brown tell me." The effect has been growing in the population pretty much ever since the the Hollywood Western and Gangster movies where every gun death depicted had to be in service the Hayes morality code. We are conditioned from the time we first turn on a television to associate the firing of guns with good outcomes - the good guys never die, the bad guys can never shoot straight, the right guns always win the day. The reality is that the firing of a gun in anger virtually never has good outcome for anybody.

Saw a side by side pic the other day showing where one of the top end electronics packages had been removed from the M777s that were sent. obviously the long term ambition is to move the east/ideological border east to include Ukraine, the hope being that this ‘experience’ with the Russians will pull them permanently into “Europe” as their world view. Could fail, but a chance the West probably needs to take. of course as I write this I can’t help but think the same args were made about Iraq. The counter arg would be Ukraine is already much closer to the West than Iraq was/is which improves the odds.

you are spot on again.

yup. And this is exactly what is going to happen. Obsession with the details will be the prime political distraction from the pro gun side to obfuscate the issue. What it comes down to is that there may be some perfect world in which America's weapons nutballs can have have their deadly high power toys without it turning into he country into the shambles that America is today, but it's utopia, you can/will never get to that world. It's much easier to just get rid of the stupid deadly toys to get back to some measure of a sane society.

so late round 2019 pick as JR out of VaTech. Had a huge rookie league launch with +1000 OPS in 160 AB . Jumped to AA last year and was not terrible - 750 OPS, 25% K rate. Back to AA for '22. Had a 740 OPS at the end of April, then lit the afterburners: > 1400 OPS for May! K rate holding at ~25%. And he is hitting LHP as a LHB - in limited ABs. I would think you might as well be aggressive with all these COVID kids who have already lost a year. I don't know if you swap Robson though, doesn't it look like at this point he is on board as a long term AAA guy? If you don't have room for him give him his release and let him catch on with another AAA team if he can.

it actually has rained almost non-stop here in A^2 since before game time. I think it's one of those patterns where the rain could have fallen anywhere in a large region at any time. Still, it seems you could still start it and see where you got. But I wonder --- if the decision to call prior to game time is up to the home team I can imagine Avila wanted no part of having one of his two still standing starters out there in slippery conditions.

Game winner for Helmer with about 5 sec left. Good for him.

isn't this the 2nd time it has happened this season? I thought they called one the 1st week or 2 of the season early in the afternoon and then nothing happened that night? Not sure if was here or on the road though.......(looks through sched and GD thread....._ ) KC on April 17. Called early in the day and the claim was that it ended up not raining in KC at game time.... I suppose they can justify it by saying the field was soaked or something.

Dylan Smith with another strong outing, 6 IP 1H 1BB 7K Greene out the game after 3 AB. LO SS, GO 1B, GO 2B.(No K's)

A couple of hours ago Weather Underground had the rain moving out, but it looks just it just parked itself in the City. It did stop here.....

Or "There is a plan but Man keeps setting it back" - or basically the 'long arc of history' concept.

yeah - the whole 'predestination' thing doesn't work with free will. Can't square that circle. Voids moral responsibility and no Church will go there. So you are left with God that is omnipotent but doesn't know the future, God that is omnipotent and omniscient but chooses not to intervene, and God that is neither omnipotent nor omniscient ( e.g. alien architect concept). Organized church doesn't like to talk about any of those options much but generally settles on some variation of #2.

It's interesting how the narrative has shifted over the years. Dan Marino, John Elway, Drew Brees - great QBs who could not consistently get their teams deep in the playoffs - you could list a lot more. So the narrative was that a good QB was a piece of the puzzle but you wouldn't get far without the pieces around him. But it seems that with Rodgers, Mahomes, and Brady - their teams are there every year, and there is a shift in the narrative toward the side that 'if you find *that* guy - you are golden almost regardless of what else you do". Of course not completely, but more than in the past. Is it because we are getting QBs so good that they dominate like they never could in the past, or maybe the game keeps shifting to where the QB position is more and more dominant than ever.

4:45 pm, raining in spots in A^2 but current radar forecast is that it's going to break up pretty quickly instead of moving east like storms usually do.

Football is a GM's sport. Anytime you bring in a new FO it's fair to be hopeful because even bad ownership can stumble on a good GM.

To me the frustrating thing about the playoffs in that period was the huge differential in the officiating. I know this exists in all sports other than baseball to some degree, but the Wings had built a team that played a great entertaining brand of hockey and the officials in the playoffs just let the less talented teams beat up the Wings up for it. So sure, go back, add more grit and try again, but I thought it was poor management of the sport overall. And the game we have today is certainly more a legacy of the Russian five style of play than Brendan Shanahan's (not that I had anything against Shanahan as a Wing, he was what was needed)

Also some sort of weird harmonic convergence that Joe Sakic is the Av's GM and Steve Yzerman is now Detroit's.

Yet it really is because they are completely separate issues. The only connection is the subject is life and death, but thousands of things relate to life and death, that doesn't show that there is an any functional or legal dependence between treating the issues at all. Is the mindset that any murder, mayhem, war or famine is not be addressed because abortion? It's like saying you can't address stray dog licensing because of crypto currency because they both involve money. At core it's just an ad hominem attempting to attack the opponents based on bad faith, which is ridiculous, irrelevant and non-sequitur.

Always deflection. Because no answers for the issue at hand.

Does he want them to be shot in the positive sense? No Does he care less if they get shot than that he lose an endorsement? Obviously yes. What more proof is possible than his total deflection, abdication of responsibility, inactivity, no even obstruction, of any possible action? The inability/unwillingness of Americans to identify or call out clear political reality when it is smacking them upside the head just because it's 'their' side, never ceases to amaze.

and frankly I don't give a damn if it hurts the legal gun owner. The legal gun owner needs his guns a lot less than kids in American need to live.

Millions of illegal guns are confiscated every year by the police. Even if a perp has a gun, once he knows he can't easily get another one, he is far less likely to carry it on the street. A gun in a closet is damn site safer than one on the street. If he does get it out to commit a crime -if he get's caught, it will be confiscated. These are not insoluble problems. Of course it takes time, maybe years - who cares? Let's move in the right direction. If you happened on an isolated population where not a sole know anything about written language, it would take a generation before you had any reasonable level of literacy, does that mean you refuse to open the first school? Human capital and human society require investment to build up and that can take time, but investments are assumed to yield dividends over time, not instantly.

That is how the training usually reads - secure the site, wait for more tactical support. Unless of course it's a darker shaded person selling cigarettes or some other situation where time is truly of the essence.....

this is great post Chasfh, nailed it right on the head. Evil is always invoked as an excuse for abdicating responsibility. People act out what they believe, and what they believe is what their environment has mirrored of back to them. That may be faulty either because their environment was faulty or because mental illness prevented reality from being mirrored back to them accurately. Either way it's an excuse to pass things off to the metaphysical realm while passing on our own responsibility to create a society that will reflect a better environment in people's minds or care for those whose minds are not capable of it. Don't these believers in Satan's agency ever wonder why he seems so content to sleep on all those secularists everywhere else in the world? You'd think they would figure out they must be praying to the wrong God by now. But yeah - I know, being attacked by Satan must surely be a sign of one's piety. So many lost/misled people in this country....

you can score runs without the long ball, but it's a lot harder, and you have to have a balanced line-up with no holes, which the Tigers most definitely do not have ...at least so far. 🥲