gehringer_2

LOL - exactly what I was thinking!

I don't know if this works better here or in the media meltdown thread - but yet another "Losing is Winning, really!" piece in - you guessed it - the NYT. link to silly op-ed

also, if truly not a set of hardly credible co-incidences, the possibility of multiple murders including 'non-combatant' women and children family members strikes me more likely to be the work of some kind of extremist group rather than UKR agents, especially the knife/axe work. It would be an odd 'ism' that sought no credit however -- unless the play is to build up a 'resume' before announcing their existence.

The idea of an insurgency inside Russia is maybe too good to be true, but OTOH, since overt political action is impossible and the technological means for protected inter-cadre communication/organization exists in ways the old surveillance state never had to deal with, who knows?

Or it wil get buried like Moscoso’s the other night…..🙈🙉🙊

It looks like China might actually try to lock down Beijing. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/world/asia/covid-beijing-shanghai.html Can anyone explain what Xi thinks the end game is to this? Covid is not going to go away - it's going to be become a circulating communicable infection around the globe that virtually everyone is eventually going to have to be become resistant to via exposure or vaccination or be killed by. It's manifestly not just going to disappear like Sars I did so that one day the Epids can just declare 'it's gone'. Unless Xi thinks he can close China - a commercial behemoth - off from people coming and going in and out of the country forever, his policy of absolute containment make zero sense and is doomed to ultimately fail. You can't have aspirations to lead a world economy with closed borders and your people embargoed from international travel. Xi is so fixed on trying to prove that China can to "it" better than the West that he's lost track of the fact that his "it" is a counterproductive policy for his people.

also seeing reports that the Russians attempted to storm the Azovstal plant on Sunday - so much for another Russian piece of BS that they were happy to leave them besieged. The Russians want the win badly the Ukrainians continue to deny them. https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/light-will-defeat-darkness-ukraine-marks-orthodox-easter-amid-misery-of-war-20220425-p5afs1.html among others...

If a refinery is 'burning', it could still be staged though it would require great care not to do any real damage, I would probably argue enemy action -it could get too damn expensive for a false flag and could take months to fix. A pipeline attack, or even an odd storage tank, sure - relatively easy to fix (or do without in the case of a tank) and a burning tank makes for spectacular footage even if it's small (tiny really) potatoes operationally. Maybe the bigger oddity though would be doing a false flag in two locations - why bother with that level of detail?

the difference is that Brett was wrong (stupid rule but he had violated it) and Schwarber is right! Good for him. I have to say it didn't look completely spontaneous though - like maybe he had been stewing over it from before that at bat - the gestures were so well thought out - he was so careful to not contact Hernandez and he terminated the display and walked off without restraint..... The question is what will the league do? He didn't touch the ump, he didn't require restraint, he left the field after being ejected. If they suspend him it's a pure admission they can't tolerate a little truth because he didn't violate any rules other than arguing balls and strikes and getting ejected.

Should be on the DVR. There is a twitter report on the Starsky accnt you quoted above supporting the false flag theory that Russians evacuated military families from Bryansk last week. So hypothetically, I'm Putin, why would I do this?: If I cut off oil supplies to Germany and persuade them it is the Ukrainian's fault I'm wedging them away from the alliance. Counter point: How much help is Germany actually being to the cause? Counter counter point: maybe not much now but let's keep it that way......

we can aspire to be the 2006 Cardinals!

Sorry I don't have the link but I read a piece the other day that ran pretty much counter to the common narrative that it's too dangerous to escalate this war by taking it to the Russians. The counter argument is that no matter how badly they do in Ukraine tactically, they simply will not stop lobbing artillery and missiles into the country and making it uninhabitable until the West gives up, OR - the war is taken to them and they are defeated. Not in a position to say much about the overall soundness of that strategically, other than that it was a cogently argued position based on the history of Russian military practice.

to me it all goes back to an intellectual incapacity to deal with complexity - or nuance if you want to put it that way. History is complex, people are complex, events are complex. But today we have to have neat little categories- and woe betide any cross overs that make for grey. I wouldn't want to live in the real Greece of circa 550BC for 10 minutes, doesn't mean I can't appreciate that they invented the concept of intellectual inquiry and all the good (and bad) that has flowed from that. We have no scope anymore to comprehend the oppressed who also oppresses or the oppressor who also liberates. and to my view, (and I think we've talked about this in the past), it's not just the drive to tear down heroes, it's at least as much the foolishness of putting them on pedestals to begin with and then choosing sides to defend them. I feel no need to pass judgment on whether Thomas Jefferson was a 'good' man or not to appreciate the objective fact of what he accomplished to create a new nation., etc

Bastille Day! Mais oui!

I agree with all this. But would add that the at one time the US was probably also just as powerfully assimilationist. The increased tolerance for the 'idea' of non-assimilated immigrants - esp on the left, is pretty much a development in my lifetime (the general rise of cultural relativism). I say 'idea', because in practice immigrant populations in the US do assimilate within 2 generations regardless of whether the chattering classes happen to see that more as an expression of moral uprightness or cultural genocide -- Of course with the glaring exception of any group that can be considered 'black' by American social construct.

If you can't pronounce the city North of Windsor Ont with 3 syllables, you have no business broadcasting Hockey in Canada.

The French intellectual tradition would attempt to separate the Muslim from Islam wouldn't it? In that sense a French 'pro-Muslim' position is anti-racist (i.e. 'good') while the anti-hijab position is secularist/anti-religious (also 'good'). So the positions are not necessary contradictory by French logic. But of course the at least partial irony is that at from a fundamentalist Muslim perspective, the division of the religious and political is a completely false dichotomy. So Macron is fine with Muslims - as long as they are secularized. So the overlay is sort of a separation of 'Muslim' as a religious marker vs a nationality marker. The French intellectual estab being more at ease with the later than the former. Which is not too terribly different from the situation here, the French positions are just more explicit. The American right extols religion - as long as it's their version of Christianity, while most of the US left disdains it (the once vibrant American Christian left having exited, stage left), while still willing to hold their nose and accept a general non-preferential religious freedom at the theoretical level - esp if it's non-Christian.

Well, the GOP is trying to take care of that.

Politics is more Sports&Entertainment to Americans than civic responsibility. Thus the media gives it the horse-race, because that is all that holds consumer eyeballs.

IDK - to me, this has to be a potentially contending season. With Mize, Manning, Skubal, Tork and Greene all promoted, it's not like there are any stars in waiting that are going to make the team much better next year than now - at least if Greene is not out all year. None of the guys in the system now, other than Jobe - who is years away, have anything like the profile of Tork or Greene as sure bets.....This is unlike say the Wings, where there is talent in the pipeline assumed to be far better than the players on the team now or the Lions where they still need at least another draft or two to even fill the roster. If the young pitchers hold up - which at this point means Manning gets back very soon, Mize reasonably soon, and Skubal keeps it up, I don't see any reason to believe the team is going to be any better in any future year than they can be now. If the three arms don't they aren't a contender this year or in the future. The only big plus for next year will be to have Turnbull back, but 50/50 we lose some other pitcher by then and it will be a wash.

I think the dirty little secret is that they are harder to make to consistent quality - safer to leave it to the big guys who have the scale to iron out the bumps.

a lot of the media stuff is not sustainable. Each one's valuation had gotten inflated based potential to capture a total market that remains chopped up in a zillion little pieces. But that's just another symptom of the general over inflation of equity values created by 20 yrs of people fleeing bonds. As interest rates rise it's going to get very painful at the stock exchanges.

Maybe they want Garcia to pitch more regularly than he would be likely to get the chance for here. He has a lot of experience innings to make up.

I guess Willi has hidden talents us mortals haven't seen yet. I will admit to being surprised at how strong his arm was on a play he made at short on Sat. I didn't remember that about him. In any case, you know Harold is way set up to regress to his mean now, so the second IF should be timely.

No. Schoop has started making some contact, I'm less worried about him than Jeimer, who looks really lost from both sides.