gehringer_2

each night that comes with Kyiv still standing is another day for the Ukrainians to build out and organize resistance from exile, and another hammer blow in the forging of a national identity that will feed it. Putin may win on the battle field for a time, but the blood he sheds does nothing but fertilize the growth of Ukrainian nationalism. Interesting parallels here to the American revolution. The colonies were full of Englishmen, with history and ties to England not unlike those between Ukraine and Russia, but the actions of a wayward King forged an enduring new national identity despite that.

well, one thing is for sure, Putin's claim reported by the NYC that things slowed because he 'paused' the Russian advance to explore peace talks is load of nonsense.

appears one paper centers on genetic fingerprinting and the other on case spread geography. The genetics focused paper is over 75 pages.

Language curmudgeons of the world, unite!

Good people on both sides

hasn't learned the 1st lesson of urban warfare from Iraq: the more rubble you make, the more difficult it will be to take or hold the ground. And it would appear that "Russian precision munition" may be even much more of an oxymoron than in the US case.

At some point you have to wonder if the Russian General staff is going to hold all in with Putin. It's one thing to roll into to town and take over the government with almost no shooting as in Checko '68, or even to shoot at Arabs or Chechens, this is asking guys from Ohio to go to war with Missouri when the guys in MO are shooting back.

Methinks they are not too interested in winning back America's suburban housewives.....

this is the continuation of a long story with many chapters. For instance, when the Bolsheviks took control after the October revolution, they demanded allegiance from the Armenian Patriarch in Yerevan as condition for not destroying the church in the Armenian SSR. In response to his capitulation, the Armenian diaspora set up a new church in exile with a Patriarch in NYC. I don't know this story but in fragments of memory but apparently there was even an assassination or attempt at one carried out in NYC in the 30's - I think of a representative of the co-opted Bolshevik church. (If you wondered why a community like Detroit would have two separate Armenian Orthodox churches, Southfield and Dearborn, there is your answer.) But in any case, there is no doubt that from the beginning Putin has seen his re-rehabilitation of Orthodox church after its general suppression under communism as a significant tool of his politics. The recognition of the national Ukrainian Church by the Greeks was fairly big news when it happened and Putin was PO'd at the time and the article is surely spot on that it's just one more thing that sticks in his craw. What the article misses however, is that even he takes Kyiv, the Church may decide to go into exile, like the Armenian church did. Putin would be left in possession of the architecture, while still losing the soul of the institution.

so to be clear, the take is that they have deserted?

the Indian armed forces are pretty much in a state of disaster are they not? I wonder if Xi may have sent Modi a message reminding him of his inability to defend his northern borders.

and this is exactly where the baseball owners are stuck in some kind of feudalist fantasy. You aren't Lord of some manor above being examined. Open the books, make a deal on the total revenue split, and have long term peace to work on improving the marketing of the game for the profit of all. But as long as the owners continue to carry on like mafia dons afraid to be audited, the players will never, ever trust them.

Putin may yet manage to rouse Germany from its slumbers.

I don't think capitalism vs socialism captures it was well as the idea of a league organized as independent teams vs franchises of a single league entity does. In the NFL the larger revenue source - i.e. the TV contract, belongs to the league and the teams participate in that members like franchises of a single corporate ownership. In baseball every team is an independent economic entity and pretty much the only concession to that is those competitive balance dollars. College football is a curious hybrid because other than a very few schools like ND, NCAA TV contracts are generally with conferences, but in college FB the gate is still a big chunk of a team's revenue and it is no accident that there is a pretty strong correlation between average winning percentage and stadium size in NCAA football.

I knew I remembered that the PO is mentioned in the Constitution, but it's only as a power, not a duty: from article I sec 8.

well, it is early. Didn't it take the US 20 days to take Baghdad?

didn't the NL and AL have different divisional schedules in the early days of divisional play? I thought the NL had more intradivisional games than the AL for some period.....(?)

no arg there. I was only taking up the specific supposition Rob noted that some have argued that Truman could not have made a different decision. Of course he could have, he could have directed them to drop it two miles offshore or on a non-urban area, or in the other direction on Tokyo instead of a secondary city - or held off longer on the 2nd bomb. For better or worse the specific history happened as it did because specific people decided to do it the way it was done, and I was expressing skepticism that you can argue the CIC out of that decision matrix. Even if Truman punted and followed along - that was still a choice he had to make as Pres.

Wouldn't you need a constitutional amendment to kill the post office?

I believe 154 was a more or less magic number at the time because the leagues were trying to play a balanced schedule. You had 8 team leagues, so you played each of 7 other teams 22 times. When expansion began, there were a couple of years where the two leagues had a different number of teams, but by 1962 they had 10 each so they when to 162 with a balanced schedule were you played each team 18 times. Subsequent expansions and divisional org have laid waste to any possibility of everyone playing everyone else the same number of times other than within divisions, so today the choice for the length of the season is completely arbitrary other than to quantitative junkies concerned about seasonal counting stats. This history does point out one fact that we lose sight of comparing eras. When you faced a team 22 times in a season, you got to know all the pitchers really well. This had to be a huge advantage for hitters that is lost today and no doubt another influence in the rise of the all or nothing hitting approach.

If Putin hitches his wagon to Xi, he will find out soon enough that Xi's interest is purely transactional. Xi doesn't care about Putin or Russia, only what China can suck out of it on its own way to greater empire.

Hard not to conclude Tony Clark has been worse than a disaster.

I've never been interested enough to pursue the history myself, or verify any of these claims, but at least in the view of my family, the area around Yerevon, which is where the current nation of Armenia is, following from the Russian designation of its Soviet Republic, was not really that much the center of the Armenian culture of the Ottoman empire, which my family would have told you had been in Anatolia and Mediterranean Turkey. As far as my family saw it, those up in the Caucusus were the equivalent of Armenian Hillbillies....

Romad and Buddha are the history mavens, most I can say I know about WW1 is that there was a big deal made about having to defend freedom of navigation after a U-Boat torpedoed the Lusitania. Of course the Germans claimed Cunnard was ferrying war material. Just read a bit on the Zimmerman telegram - appears to have also have been a contributor. Of course it's a fool's errand trying to separate individual bits of motivation out from the totality of a decision like that. BTW -the family story is that Grandfather, who had enlisted because it was a chance to strike a blow against the Ottomans, was on a ship on the way over on 11/11/18, and thus got to step foot back in Europe only to get right back on the boat to the new world.

Not to worry, Cade has already missed three times more shots than Killian.