gehringer_2

I don't understand why you associate any assumption - whether incorrect or not, that Beech might be gay as constituting blaming him for anything. Is it any more or less a crime to rape a straight man than a gay one? The "blame to go around" refers to society as a whole having created homophobia - But if this is what you didn't read as I intended it I can see that now.

so run this by me again because I'm missing it. Alridge is going to end Beech's career by injuring him, or by smearing him? And if the latter, what is the basis? If the smear is based on the event it's still fundamentally based on homophobia, is it not? If you are straight why to do care if you are accused of being gay if that is not does not have a negative shade?

TBH SFC, your post about 'homophobic slurs' is part of why I was confused. I obviously didn't take it the way you meant it.

besides, how is it blaming Beech if he were gay? Whose biases are showing there?

that is fair enough, but not all that relevant for Beech. That is making Toews the story and he doesn't rate it. Unless there is something to actually hold him accountable for - and if there is that is what should be the topic. That a pro athlete is a narcissist is not news.

OK - I was honestly confused by what I have read in the thread and realized it and went back and reread the story, and I'm still confused. Now someone is talking baseball bat - in one of the earlier stories it did say Alridge theatened to smear him, not beat him. So I'll pass saying more until I'm more clear here.

and I'll go back to the fact that I wouldn't count on them not going there if the money gets tight. We can probably keep betting on their virtue as long as Michigan fan stays happy enough to keep buying tickets. If that part goes away, I'm not sure I take the bet.

apparently once Bert got hurt, being left with Mantha just sucked out his soul....

..

My recollection is that 5/100K was an action level the epidemiologists were working with early on - that certainly has probably changed given that the bug has ended up more infectious than originally estimated. But OTOH, the original concept here being that if you can contact trace all the positives, you can keep it in check, and so the stable infection level really has more to do with how much public health resource you have to do contract tracing rather than any particular property of the infection and that is what I believe that 5/100k number was based on. Now in practice Covid has overrun anyone's capability to do effective contact tracing so that has not been part of the conversation for months, but that doesn't mean the concept wasn't correct. As this comes under control there should be levels at which things like contact tracing (or whatever) that were not feasible at high infection rates come back into play, and those considerations should allow the Epids to come up with action levels to relax. But the larger point is that it's not all just black magic and numbers pulled from a hat. The estimates may not always turn out to be correct but they do have non-arbitrary reasons for choosing them.

Another obsolete concept in the age of the cell phone camera and internet.

but there is still an even more general point. We don't pay our pro-athletes to be great people, we pay them to be great athletes. You could pick any day of the weak and find reasons to pick out athletes and dump on them for not being saints. That's just the way it is. We seem to have enough trouble holding those accountable who actually do the bad stuff. Spending a lot of energy on judging other peoples reactions about it seems unproductive.

I think I would leave the letters there but put cross-outs over them. Isn't remember and repudiate better than just erase and forget?

one thing they did guess wrong about initially is that the level of vaccination required to stop transmission is higher than 70%, it's over 80%. But you are correct that in highly vaccinated populations, the same case rate will represent a much lower incidence of serious desease, so the concern over case rates is not comparable when comparing Denmark to Michigan's Cass Co. (vax rate <45%). But in the US vaccination rates in too many places are still too low to be sanguine about case(=positive test) rates.

then again, the Tigers are rehabbing Franklin Perez.....

Yeah - it's a beyond unfair that we expect everyone to have professional media relations skills. Toews is a hockey player, it's dumb to expect him to be a font of finely tuned current cultural wisdom. But you hit the nail on the head - you have to know when to just make a perfunctory statement without saying anything.

It's not the what - it's the how. We've known for a year now that we can kill this thing by masking and vaccinating people and here we are in the worlds supposedly premier 1st world country with 40% of the population unvaccinated. It's not true that the it's the virus that is so clever that we can't stop it, it's that people refuse to be as 'clever' as they should already know how to be. I'm on a campus full of "irresponsible" 18-22 yr olds and we have a 5/100k infection rate while surrounded by a state with a 40/100k rate, because we are simply doing the things we all already know how to do, which is mostly getting vaccinated, but also intelligent use of masks. We can control it, we simply lack the discipline. That is not an epidemiological problem, it's a cultural one. Case rates throughout MI exactly track vaccination rates. The idea that it's still the virus that is the problem is BS.

things getting a little edgy?

Hiring him!

Brian Ellerbe on line 1.....

I've always loved the 'demotivator' posters. I used to have the 'Teamwork' one with the snowball rolling down the hill- "a few flakes can start an avalanche of destruction." (Interestingly, when I clicked that link on a Mac it left the Apple News app (which I had removed) on my desktop......😡)

LeCarre was pleased enough to have been catapulted to literary stardom by TSTCIFTC, but with the heroic Richard Burton movie and all, in the end he was not pleased that his cynicism about the spy world was being lost, so his next novel was a total downer called "the Looking Glass War." Needless to say 60's Hollywood was less interested! Of course the Brits did their own completely forgettable film which wasted a rather promising cast.

I spent most of my working life in hazardous environments. Safety is culture, and the enforcement of the culture depends completely on the immediate local management. In the end the people closest to the accident will take the fall for it, but a movie set is the director's world and the ultimate and absolute responsibility is his for allowing a hazard tolerant culture to live on his sets.

"Deserve" has little to do with whether he keeps his job. The question is does Michigan fan buy out the stadium in '22 based on 10-2? I would guess...probably yes. That's all Harbaugh needs. (and it doesn't hurt UM football marketing that the Lions are terrible either!)

Slick - but isn't it illegal to be in motion toward the LOS before the snap?