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I think it’s more insidious than that. I think much if not most of the conspiracy thinking is tied directly to evangelical Christianity. Of all the parts in the book, they embrace all the parts that has the magic in it most tightly, and now they think incredible, unbelievable things happen everywhere around them all the time. Of course, they don’t see the actual magic happening in front of their eyes, but they still believe the magic is behind everything they despise, so they hold up their hands and whisper to the skies hoping for countervailing magic to defeat it all. In the meantime, they are casting votes for and sending their living wages to anyone who makes a show of patronizing their magical thinking, hoping their efforts will hurt the people they most despise. It’s really very sad, but even worse, it’s quite dangerous, and the ironic part is, the people who get hurt most of all by it all is themselves.

How did you break away from it all? Did you read something that shook you and got you thinking? Did you just wake up out of a walking stupor? Did loved ones run an intervention for you? Enquiring minds wants to know!

Well, if it’s not satire, then she’s inadvertently making a pretty good run at it.

Just change pieces. That should do it.

Even the White Sox are going to run into a run here and there …

Good thing he didn’t because who knows what kind of difference that might’ve made!

One win down, a division title to go!

And I see on the replay that he landed square on his right elbow. Ohhhhhh doctor …

I just looked up and I have Dan on under the video—is she the fiancée or the sister?

Jesus I think I just had an aneurysm watching Riley dive for the catch.

I like using that line with our bowling team. Someone might get a strike then follow it up with 3-spare, and I tell them that’ll be a 9-spare in the paper.

lol the first big league hit by Colt Keith, a monster power hitter, is a dribbler past the pitcher, because BASEBALL!

It would explain the fans amping up the volume on the boos when he came to the plate!

I’ve said a lot of things about Baby Doc over the years, and I have softened up on him since he’s now presiding over the organization’s directional shift, but I now have a heightened level of respect for the guy for sitting in the stands with the people in an enemy ballpark in high 40s temperature in March, instead of in a luxury box.

I was wondering who Javy threw that ball to with such authority. After all, the ball man working the LF line has got to be pushing 60!

Javy Baez made our first run in the season happen basically all by himself!

Man I hate hate hate those tiny letters on the back of the jerseys. Cheap.

That’s ok at some point I will switch over to Dan

Thank you, Lord, for having someone invent VPN, and for giving me the ability to figure out how to hook it up to my ASUS router even though they changed the interface, so I can watch an otherwise blacked-out telecast from Detroit.

Another national guy who thinks the Tigers might have a chance!

I mean, I can see you're typing the words, but vast majority of the evidence I've seen from you is anecdotes from X, many of which are sketchy accounts; and the citations I've seen you you offer from MSM are pretty tame. I mean, really, a story about six elderly protesters outside a Jewish comedian's comedy show at a theater in Albuquerque? Come on.

Like. Also, that people will try better to have an opinion about Hamas rather than spread hate about Palestinians and pro-Palestinian protesters, who look like they're starting to make gains with the American public. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642695/majority-disapprove-israeli-action-gaza.aspx

I don't think that's necessarily true of Ohtani. Not everybody gets into gambling to make life-changing money. Some do it for small stakes, relative to them, anyway. Maybe that's Ohtani. Or maybe he doesn't gamble at all. We have no way of knowing even given his denials and MLB's wishful thinking. We have to wait for the Feds to dive into it, and hope that they are not being influenced by Baseball during the investigation. As for he or any other player risking his careers on gambling: I'm not sure players think about it that way anymore, despite the posting of Rule 21(d) in clubhouses, which by now has to look like just so much wallpaper to players. Baseball, like any other authoritarian force like employers or pastors or parents, like to tell us "Do as I say, not as I do". (That was practically my mother's catchphrase.) But players aren't blind: they see Baseball, and other sports, raking in billions from gambling, so if daddy acts like gambling is OK, how are the kids gonna be expected to avoid it? Remember when baseball suspended Mickey and Willie for a year just for being casino greeters in Atlantic City? Baseball had no tolerance for gambling of any kind anywhere near their sport as long as the Black Sox scandal was still in living memory. But no one is alive to remember it firsthand any longer, and it seems so much like ancient history these days. So now, with no one left to tell the story any longer, Baseball is trying to thread the needle in a very fine way: it's OK if you players gamble on this, but not that; and it's OK if you gamble there, but not here; and you can't gamble during this timeframe, but you can gamble any other time all you want. How can we expect thousands of players up and down their system to keep all that straight and toe that line exactly? And how are you going to keep gambling proxies from consorting with ballplayers? Baseball, like every other megabusiness, is trying to reap all the good while brooming all the bad out of sight under the rug. They might get away with it for a while, maybe even this time, if they can successfully convince the world that it was merely one bad apple who doesn't even play the game, for cry eye. But the day of reckoning is guaranteed to come, it will be ugly, and there will be drama and changes. Maybe not this month, or this year, or even a few years, but eventually, and inevitably.

Right, Manfred couldn't just wave a magic wand and make blackouts go away, even if that's what he wanted to do.

Yeah, Newsweek is not much better. On the others, you continually conflate pro-Palestinian protests in the western world with Hamas terrorism in Israel. To Rob's point, there can be peaceful pro-Palestinian protests, which as far as I can tell from my reading is the vast majority; there can be violent pro-Palestinian protests, which I have seen only claims on X and Reddit for; and there can be Hamas terrorism, which does not qualify as protest at all. Those strike me as all being distinct separate deals. Based on your voluminous posts here, it seems all the same to you.