gehringer_2

Gas is dangerous is and expensive to ship overseas (port siting, compression costs, ship design). There is some international capacity for overseas gas shipment but I'm not up to speed with whether it would even be enough to supply all of Germany completely - most gas moves via pipeline - much safer and cheaper - which is why Germany depends on Russia.

I'm more with MTU that the situations are quite different. The similarity is that in each case we have a western leaning leadership claiming all they need to stand up is our support, but we can't judge the truth of that claim with much accuracy. In Iraq it was completely false, in Ukraine? Who knows? Where things are very much different is that there was a deep unresolved contradiction at the heart of our Iraq intervention that US policy simply ignored/missed/misunderstood, which was that while a western leaning Sunni political elite urged us to enter, our entry was predicated on establishing a democratic state - one that by definition could not fail to result in the Shia majority displacing the Sunni from long held political power, and engendering the inevitable civil war that in fact followed. So the failure of our Iraqi enterprise (or least the vagary of anything one could call success) was baked in from the get go because we were pursuing a policy that was blind to a fundamental reality on the ground we were entering. None of the above speaks to who is right about Ukraine, but it is why it is not a very comparable situation. Ukraine in not a nation with a long suppressed religious majority, which was the single most determinative fact in Iraq.

It depends on how it goes. If there is a credible resistance left standing after an invasion I think you can count on there being western/US arms going to them under the cover of plausible deniability but undoubtedly unwritten somewhere deep in the bowels of the CIA/DOD.

everybody's got constituencies. The thing about a tyrant is that their hold on power may be absolute, right up until it's not. That said, Putin looks as well ensconced as ever.

you are quite the optimist. Form may be temporary but teams making deadline acquisitions usually want to win NOW. Add the fact that he might play better next year to $5 and you get a Vente. ☕ Then again, if Yzerman can spin him into something, it will just add to the legend....

which one got the Canary?

the problem is that it doesn't matter what the US does if we can't pull Europe along. It's easy to talk about what the US should do unilaterally, but those actions are futile if we do them alone - the key is how far we can go and keep the team together. That is the GHWB bar that Biden needs to meet. That is where Putin is counting that the West will fail, and he will be free to make his side deals - esp with the Germans, etc.

gotta keep Bertuzzi - he is a catalyst player, makes everyone he plays with better. Probably couldn't get a bag of surplus Fox-trax pucks for Leddy - he's been terrible. Maybe if we found and burned all his film from this year......🤔 Sure, I could see Yzerman moving Zadina and Namestekov for picks he can package to move up in the next draft - but in the end pretty small potatoes. Move those two and it means we get Veleno back, which is kind of a wash, but also *maybe* Berggren, which could be fun.

Nothing on the ground in Donbas has changed until Russian troops start crossing old lines of control. Do we see that yet? You still have to wonder how long before Putin's generals tell him he has to shit or get off the pot? And it's been in the 40s and 50s all week in Ukraine. Hard ground is slipping away.

Call it historical recency bias. We look at the past through the lens of what is important to us now, which may or not have been important (relatively) to the options that a leader had at the time. The real test is what did a leader choose to do out of the universe of options that were actually open to him, not the universe of what we would have a leader do today. Now it is fair to say Wilson fails the test because he resegregated the Federal Government as an active choice. Even in its own historical context I don't see any reason to forgive that. It's sort of like when they do 'period' piece movies or television. They almost always fail any honest evaluation of their historical accuracy because nobody today would care about what the characters in that day actually cared about. It would make little sense to the present audience (for an example read Pride and Prejudice - it's takes a very active sense of imagination to believe anyone cared about what were matters of life and death to those characters!). Even Mad Men, which started out being about the 60's was really about today within a couple of seasons.

but politically the country was still behind the war in 1968. LBJ couldn't win in '68 because he was losing the war, not because he was executing it. Don't confuse the noise with the real action. The activity of the hippies were largely futile. But they were the college crowd who grew up to be the liberals/literate ones so they have written the history as though they won it. The real numbers in even in their own generation are still conservative Trump voters today. The thing is, the upheaval between the boomers and our parents, which was real, was about much more than the Vietnam War. It had it seeds in the great Depression and WWII. And LBJ's presidency had nothing to do with that.

odd thing is that I think there is a LOT of revisionist history in the US about VN. We are a little bit like the French after WWII, in the same way you could find enough 'partisans' on every Paris corner in 1950 to make you wonder how the Germans ever got there, conversely by 1980 you couldn't find all the people who elected Nixon - who was still a big time hawk running for the WH in '68. The country only really came apart about the war after it was over, the majority of Americans supported it long after LBJ had left the scene. Sure, those of draft age made a lot noise at places like Chicago, but in they end it wasn't them that finally moved the public, is was only exhaustion with military failure that finally turned the tide.

it's a testament to operant conditioning that their viewers can still watch Fox without their brain exploding. Actually the story is false anyway, all they are doing in Donbas is putting their regular uni's back on.

IDK, when teams use turf they aren't required to have dirt except for sliding boxes at the bases. They still painted a line though, even if it didn't matter to anything anything. e.g

We pinkos in Ann Arbor are an island floating in a malevolent sea.

I had a similar thought.

the weird thing is that Putin is basically saying no-one had it right but the Romanovs. Lenin was a sloppy fool so we reject the Bolsheviks take on history, Gorbachev gave away the store so we reject the Glasnost history. Is there really that much nostalgia in Russia for Monarchy and serfdom that it can be good PR to basically plant your flag on returning the country to Tsarism? And of course if you want to talk history, it's only natural Ukraine should have such brotherly affection for Mother Russia after Stalin thought starving most of the population would be just the thing to cement Russo-Ukrainian Slavic unity.

Yeah - Marc Crawford was pretty nuts. (Of course hitting Scotty in the head might hurt - doesn't he have a metal plate in his head?)

RIght. As unlikely as it seemed in 2015, what Donald Trump had done in effect is join the pantheon of American Televangelists. Kenneth Copeland, Pat Robertson, Joel Osteen et all send their regards.

If we are going to re-adjudicate every national boundary since Lenin the world is in even bigger trouble. If Putin really wants to go that route maybe Japan should reclaim all its one time Asian holdings.

People say this, but look at the % of GDP the US Federal Government spends. Other than wars and depression/catastrophe (including the Covid spend spree) spending the drift up has been pretty moderate over 60yrs considering the changes in the world.

Obama was only important because of his bio. That is still saying a lot - a huge amount really. Politically, it's not clear to me if anyone could have done anything more with the GOP opposition he faced, though it's probably safe to assume that at heart a lot of that opposition was also because his bio, so the two things are probably inseparable. In all respects other than his ambitions for health care Obama was a frightfully conventional thinker, and despite his obvious intellectual candlepower he really had no sense of what the US economy needed beyond the need to prevent Wall Street from imploding. But there was really no hope for any meaningful economic progress to come out of the 2008 election. Clinton and Obama were both in thrall to the NY banking establishment and McCain didn't have an economic thought in his head.

opinion on grant seemed to have pinballed all over the place - he was either a useless drunk or a great visionary. Guess you had to be there.... Same with Jackson to some degree. When I was in school opinion on Jackson in History books was pretty positive, today he commonly seems to be considered to have been an idiot.

Or they had him rest his arm for a couple of months after the season and when he restarted conditioning it was no better.

yes, course exactly this. The hitters already have the jacked up ball that is making it advantageous net offense wise for them to pull everything *despite* the shift, then people moan and groan that the balls that don't make it over fence aren't going for singles too. Screw that.