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This matters in terms of stability of the world, but to Trump world, diplomacy is de facto weakness, so they still see it as a Trump win and Biden loss. The trick is, getting people to vote for the stability of the world.

Just like the Alarmist Non-sense from 2016 that Trump would be a threat to democracy? 😉

I'm just trying to imagine what the practical implications of trying to extradite Trump against his will would look like. I'm not saying I think he'll refuse to go, but I'm just trying to imagine what the practical implications would be if he did refuse, which I'm not sure is out of the question entirely. Would it redound more to his benefit or to his detriment? At what point would they resort to force to get him to go? How would they keep the optics of something like that from lighting up his most ardent action-oriented followers? I'm sure they're gaming this out already. I hope we don't see it, but it fascinates me to contemplate it.

What would happen if Trump simply refused to go to Georgia for any purpose related to this indictment? How would they get him there? I don’t see them arresting and extraditing him because they would give him martyr cred. They can’t try him in absentia because the Supreme Court basically ruled against that in a case called Crosby v. United States. Plus it would make the justice system look like they have no power to compel. So if Trump simply refuses to appear in Georgia court, then what? Or is that an unimaginable possibility even for him?

I think they’re in a bit of a tough spot with Jake. He’d had a pretty good run beginning in early June, starting 26 of 40 team games and slashing .307/.371/.557. They may have been trying to ease him into a heavier #1 catcher’s load role as he played in 13 straight games starting July 28, starting nine of them. It was the longest stretch of games he’s been basically in that role. But since that date, Jake has slashed .128/.160/.298 in 50 plate trips, so I can see why they’ve eased up on him the last few days. If Harris and Hinch were to commit to playing him three of every four games regardless of such results and damn the torpedoes, there would be a lot of torpedoes launched, including from here. Jake might be one of those many, many big leaguers who are fine when you play them part-time, but give them a full-time job and then you see everything they can’t do all the time. There are way more guys like that than there are legit everyday players. As for his future, Jake’s already 28, so there’s only so much future you can expect from him. It’s probably 50-50, at best, that he makes it to the next playoff team. So it will be interesting to see whether Harris makes a big catcher move this winter, or else we roll the dice with Jake as the primary for another year.

They based it on each team’s Facebook likes broken out by ZIP codes, which explains the borders you’re referring to. It may or may not reflect reality, but I surprised because of what I’d come to learn about it for years.

I had always heard that Michigan football is most popular around Detroit and Ann Arbor, but Michigan State is more popular outstate, so I was a little surprised to see this map from NYTimes.

I can’t help but think, where were the parents who were allowing all this to happen under their noses? It’s mind-boggling. I sense that neither today’s parents nor society at large would allow this kind of thing to go on like that. Kids today are generally kept on a way tighter leash then the kids of my generation were.

I do think it’s plausible that there might be things discovered in the investigation that could be considered so explosive, they would be prevented from being revealed in open court. Unless we are a perfectly transparent information society, which I doubt.

And just like that, it’s as though none of that even happened. Foley and his closer mentality saves the day!

Baddoo saves one runner …

Oh, wow, don’t tell me Foley is turning into a pumpkin now …

An omniscient 13-year-old with a hilariously Trumpy nickname leading an entire worldwide cult to do her bidding? Sure, why not. This is exactly the kind of detail that would be attached to such a fantastical conspiracy story, and that will lead everybody following it to fall all over themselves demonstrating to the world how much they believe it. Consider the source—IOW, lol Vice.

My question was not about whether such a revelation would change red hats’ minds. I don’t care either way. My question was about whether TPTB would suppress such explosive evidence in the first place, in the interest of avoiding riots, civil unrest, guerrilla activities, etc., which such a revelation by itself might reasonably lead to, in the interest of protecting the nation, or however they might put it.

😉

Is that as explosive, as direct, as evidence would be of Trump being paid billions personally by hostile governments? I know some media reported Jared getting paid billions by the Saudis, but that's from a story in the heavily-disparaged media, not evidence presented during trial in open court; plus the payment to Jared was not a direct payment to Trump himself. What I'm wondering is, if the investigation did find such direct payment, explicitly, would that presented in open court for the whole world to see and damn the consequences? Or would it be sealed for, e.g., "the good of the country"?

Thought exercise, nothing more: What if, once having sifted through all the evidence, they find proof positive that Trump has the kind of relationship with Russia and/or the Saudis where they gave him billions of dollars personally and he made or approved policy decisions with the expressed intent of benefiting them—meaning a direct quid pro quo—which has led directly to, for instance, the invasion of Ukraine and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, or to the murder of dissident journalists and the like. I couldn't hazard a guess about what all the details would look like, but just what if. A lot of people talk as though this is already happening and many take it for granted, almost in a shrug-what-else-would-you-expect-from-Trump kind of way. But as far as I can tell, there is no proof positive. But for this thought exercise, let's say this investigation actually does uncover the proof positive, stuff uniquely explosive because it involves his personal enrichment in exchange for allowing the deaths of people his benefactors want dead. Would such evidence ever come out in court, or even otherwise be reported at all? Or would that kind of evidence be considered so explosive, so fantastic, so likely to lead to civil unrest, so damaging to the institution of the presidency beyond repair, that they think the better of it and seal it for good? As a broader question, is there a limit to what they would allow along such lines into the public record?

Plus he will turn 32 next September.

This may be something like projecting Hall of Fame trajectory based on rookie season, but based on what I’ve seen so far, I think there’s a decent chance Max becomes to first 20U position player to take the field for the Tigers since Cameron Maybin in 2007.

I put a bit more stock in Fangraphs than in Pipeline. FG seems to be based on tools and performance, with exhaustive descriptions of each, while Pipeline seems more topline overview with perhaps some influence by narrative.

Don’t look now, but TORK! is a halfway-decent hot streak away from ending up with 30 bombs.

The original line in Chuck Berry’s song was: “She's too cute to be a minute over seventeen”. So … what was Seger trying to tell us about himself? But hey, like Tiger337 implied, it was the 70’s and things were different. It was very common to see children, particularly young girls, being quite sexualized in popular culture. Just as a top-of-mind example, consider the innuendos surrounding Tatum O’Neal’s character in Bad News Bears. Another example: pictures of a naked Brooke Shields as a child that were published in newsstand magazines! I had wondered about this for a long time and couldn’t even reasonably hypothesize why that era, which I myself grew up in, sexualized children, who were my contemporaries, like no other time before or since. I saw the new Brooke Shields documentary a few months ago and they provided one possible answer that hadn’t occurred to me: in the face of “women’s lib”, during which an entire gender was finally standing up and asserting themselves like never before, the men of the era, who basically owned and ran popular culture vehicles like Hollywood and book and music publishing and the like, responded by turning away from the adult women of that time and started fetishizing the innocence of the young girls. That explanation makes a lot of sense to me.

This is how the indictment is playing in the Russified right wing blowtorch media. Very consistent with the whole "they look like they're coming after me but really it's you they're coming after" grift.

Isn't that true of every participant in the Cristofascist Grifter Industrial Complex?