gehringer_2

If China eventually losses control of Omicron despite the draconian measures to keep the lid on, Xi is going to see a level of pressure he probably thought he had reached immunity from.

maybe....hard to see how college baseball could fill the role that college football does given that it doesn't generate very much revenue, and even if you somehow generated the fans, it would take years to build out the college baseball stadium infrastructure to support a larger fan base.

25 cases in Washtenaw County. 1st time under 30 since.....I don't remember when.

If Correa goes back to the 'stos I'll wager it will be for less than he purportedly turned down from the Tigers - or else maybe it will be all deferred money out 20 yrs..... Along the same lines though, I'm beginning to wonder if the Tigers and Matt Boyd may not be done with each other either....

Yankees could get lucky and get 2 more good years out of Donaldson, in which this trade will be good for them, but more likely Donaldson's bat will fall off the table sooner than that.

maybe the Yankees are going to go all in on D and will join Baltimore in moving their fences back...... nah.....

can't figure out Minny. Dumping salary. But the Yankee end is odd also - a 36 yr old 3B and glove 1st SS are not really typical Yankee type targets..... ...and the list gets shorter for Correa...

another aspect of this that even with the most supportive position by Chinia, the logistics are very bad. There are only limited road and rail connections from China to Russia by land, and at this point arms shipments by sea could face Western interventions.

and this piece showed up today in NYT today by one Wnag Hulyao - who runs a 'non-governmental' think tank in Beijing (yeah - I know that's kind of an oxy-moron in today's China, but I'm just the messenger here.....). Basically making the case why this war is not really such a good thing for China. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/opinion/china-russia-ukraine.html

What I don't get is that it's crazy enough that for all intents and purposes he is "aid and comforting" the enemy, but he's not even doing a creditable job. The rhetoric is stupid weak from any side. Embargoing the importer of 8% of our imports is the "the worst..." whatever. That doesn't even make any sense as Russian agitprop.

Back in my philosophically more conservative days, I was more sympathetic to the idea that making things that are already illegal ‘more illegal’ is little more than a kind of virtue signaling, but as time goes by, I’m less sure our society isn’t becoming one in need of more formalized consensus virtue signals. If a guy with a deep record as a ‘real’ philosophical conservative, say a Justin Amash, opposed something like this one the grounds given above, I’d accept that as an honorable position, but not from this current House GOP rabble.

IDK, at least from outward appearances Chris seems pretty happy to be a baseball owner and pretty involved with the team. If he's only doing this as a chore for his mother he hides it well.

He's still too sloppy with the ball, but aside from that....

ah - memories of Eric C.

So speaking of Chris Ilitch, Henning suggested recently that the Tigers would be on the block once Marian dies. Does someone know the logic to that? The Tigers are in a Trust, Chris is the Trustee, Marian is not legally a party as far as I can see. Sure, Chris might for whatever reason sell the team, but I don't see the connection to Marian being here, or gone. I guess it depends on the rules of the trust but if Mike made Chris the supervising Trustee my understanding would be that the other siblings couldn't force a sale even if they wanted to - but I could be wrong there.

curious, Washtenaw county, which has the 2nd highest vax rate in the state and where the U is still enforcing masking in the classroom, is seeing its case rate sort of sticking just above 10/100k while it's falling lower in many places. Maybe fewer cases here through the pandemic mean that even with the higher vax rate net immunity is lower? Or just the higher population of youth due to EMU/UM, or maybe even early vaccine compliance means more people with falling immunity? Or maybe just a statistical blip this week......

attack the bearers of bad news and for sure you will stop getting bad news. And the bonus is it's always good for your adversary to keep himself in the dark. Just listened to Masha Gessen be depressing about Putin for an hour with Ezra Klein. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-masha-gessen.html?searchResultPosition=2

VerHagen was a legitimate tease, there was always a lot of talent in the arm, he just couldn't pitch! 🤷‍♀️

"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.....)