gehringer_2

"Religious school" covers a large universe. Even inside Catholicism you have wildly different intellectual strains - for instance the Jesuit tradition (and Jesuits run a lot of schools) is strongly reason/free inquiry based.

This point is worth coming back to - asymmetrical warfare was hard enough for the US to deal with when the opposition had Kalashnikovs and homemade IED's, but supplied the best of western technology and it's going to be (already is?) devastating/unbearable for the Russians.

propaganda works best when there is no competing narrative. Putin can control the media, but when the reality on the ground become contradictory to the propaganda, public mood can shift to skepticism/rejection very fast.

yeah, I remember those interpretations: "God buried all the dinosaur bones as a test" etc. So you want to believe that the supreme being in the Universe is ....Loki?

I like that the playoff system has more incentive for having the best record - division winners with the two best records get byes, third winner has to play in the wild card round.

no doubt, but I think the neighbors would still appreciated it if you take down the effigies of Clark and Manfred hanging in your front yard....

Don't know the rule of the MLBPA but in my experience in other unionized businesses I have been around in strikes that is the normal setup: the executive committee decides whether proposals go to the membership or not. The longer a strike goes on the dynamic will shift and executive committees will face more pressure to submit proposals to the membership they might not approve themselves. Of course the players union is small enough and modern communication good enough that there is really not much excuse for Clark's people to get that far off the sense of their membership. (Back in the day before the internet they used "phone chains" as the informal polling method - for instance there is list distributed in the beginning and when there is news to spread, you get a call and then are supposed to call two other people.....)

does that must mean more guys get shuttled back and forth the minors?

when a country side if full of hostile armed civilians I can understand why the armor runs without infantry! Wasn't one of the 1st things on Western re-supply lists snipers rifles?

yeah - lots of reasons why the players that most need the union to represent them are probably not in a position to participate much in the union. Not only are so many guys constantly fighting for a spot, but they also worry that being active in the union means all other things being equal on a roster decision between them and another player and they will be the one sent out. Probably a justified fear.

Still - it's one thing for Ivan not to have established 'air superiority', but another to assume the good guys control enough of the skies for A10s not to be sitting duck for superior air to air combat planes.

If you wanted the most impartial rule I could come up it would simply be to let a computer minimize the total perimeter of all districts, with the only over-ride factor being to avoid dividing existing governmental units as much as possible.

Under that interpretation Michigan's system could be thrown out then, as it was created by a citizen's initiative/constitutional amendment. So what if the constitutional amendment mandated that the legislature create the redistricting commissions? A fig leaf, but then the law is full of them....

well of course I drew out the arg to it's extreme conclusion - but you can't deny that the conservative agenda has been a long term play! But there is a federalist principle here as to what a state legislature fundamentally is. It is a creation of a state constitution, and thus subject to those state constitutional rules, or is is some kind of free floating unrestrained entity. To me that is a pretty easy answer and I have trouble seeing why a JOTSC would even be interested in visiting the question. But then I think "corporations are people" and "money is speech" are pretty asinine as well.

not the decision, the consensus expressed by some of the conservative members that they want to take up the issue of whether the language in the Constitution regarding state legislatures having power over elections trumps State Constitutional constraints on the exercise of that power. That seems like an obviously absurd position for SCOTUS to take and one can only be politically motivated in my book. For instance the US constitution may explicitly give the 'power of the purse' the the legislative branch, but that in no way means a court couldn't/wouldn't/shouldn't overturn a spending bill that violates the equal protection clause because it only allotted funds to white people. The mere assignment of a power in the Constitutions doesn't vitiate other limitations on that power They would basically be saying that no voting access rights case based on a state legislative decision could be heard except in a federal court. That seems pretty idiotic to me. Of course the next obvious step for the conservatives would then be to deny cert in the Federal courts saying they didn't have jurisdiction either.....The perfect slippery slope to eliminate right's protection.

I've always been a little sceptical of over-reliance on stealth as the physics tells you that transparency is always a matter of frequency. Now of course there are good reasons that tactical radar runs at the freqs it does, but that doesn't mean there are not engineering compromises available to increase the visibility of stealthy targets. Stealth advocates argue that these compromises cost so much in the ability to localize the target that stealthy still wins the day, but I'm not so sure someone won't get clever and figure a way to reduce it's value even if not defeat it completely. So I would keep making sure the birds we build are still good at all the non-stealthy stuff!

Fear and loathing of gay people is so deeply rooted into many cultures - esp judeo-christian. Probably the result of sexual insecurity in the males of the hierarchy over centuries driving the hidden undercurrents of cultural taboo/rule formation. I am actually surprised to see how much the US has changed toward normalizing homosexuality in the culture in my lifetime, but we clearly are not there yet. In the US today, the core issue remains that for the christian biblical literalists, the normality of homosexuality, like evolution, is one more scientific learning that they take as an attack on the cornerstone of their belief system, and one where the 'enemy' has a face, and one that has become easier to see as gays have been able to come out in the rest of society. Now that said said, I don't necessarily disagree with E that overloading young children with sexual messaging is largely inappropriate, but the joke is that rest of straight culture already does that 24/7/365 with all the sexualized advertising and media output to which they are exposed.

yeah - I think this part is easy to forget.

I could understand the idea that if the academies are getting a cut now that might go away in a draft system and that could reduce the funds available for the instructional system, but if that's the issue why are Abreu and Guillen on the other side? Not arguing here, just trying to understand the issues a bit.

LOL - most people would think their jobs just got easier if you cut their work hours by 20-30%.

interesting pic on that site of a Russian tank with sand bags piled on a platform over the turret. Appears to be makeshift attempt at Javelin defense.

so the argument is that it's the bonuses that drive participation in Latin American youth baseball? I could believe that might be true but I'd want more than one player's opinion in the way of analysis.

why are pitch clocks something that favor the owners, unless you just mean something that improves the sport overall should make the sport more profitable - in which case it should benefit the players as well? No?

I wonder how long Euro's memory about China's encouragement of Putin will be?

of course this aspect has has been rotten since forever. I don't know if there are some owners using their teams to launder dirty money or what, but that the MLB owners have never agreed to put their team finances on a transparent enough basis to share with the players so that fundamental things like a global revenue split could be negotiated is beyond absurd and maybe the single core issue that could facilitate all others.