chasfh

This is the first time I remember getting no yellow boxes before solving it in as many as four tries. Wordle 343 4/6 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I’m glad we are working to repel the Russians, but I can’t shake this feeling that somehow arming Ukraine is going to boomerang back on us, like arming the mujahideen did. Not in the exact same way, of course, just in general. Hope I’m wrong. I don’t know. Stupid feelings.

If God is omnipotent and omniscient but chooses not to intervene, then there is no God's plan.

When you put it like this, it really does highlight the utter stupidity of the Tigers' tanking strategy.

FWIW, over the last two weeks, Schoop is slashing .250/.306/.477 for a wRC+ of 126, which places him in the 62nd percentile of all hitters since May 13.

And after you read that book, read "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" by Christopher Hitchens, which presents Kissinger's involvement in a series of alleged war crimes in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor.

Well, technically, if someone believes that God controls every little thing that happens in the universe and that he makes every decision about what's going to happen, big and small, as part of God's plan, then they could be forgiven for saying God wanted their mother raped, since in their mind, that's part of God's plan. Once you've pulled on that thread, though, then you would have to admit the futility and pointlessness of praying to God for anything, since he has a plan that's already pre-ordained, and so, what, you think he's gonna change his plan for you just because you ask him dear God please let the Tigers win tonight?

Normally I might say here that there's a lot of projection at work, but then, I don't think Trump is much of a trader, so ... 🤷‍♂️

🔫🔫🔫

Wanna go one step further? Stipulate that the FGOP actually wants these acts to occur because it strengthens their pro-gun position by highlighting how liberals want to take everyone's guns away in response, which increases interest in the NRA, which increases gun sales, which increases lobby payoffs.

God bless the Onion.

While I believe that ordinary everyday people who believe in god and satan, good and evil, etc., generally come by their beliefs honestly because they have nothing more at stake than their souls, I also believe that people with power who also profess these same beliefs may or may not have come by them honestly, but in all cases understand that it's good business for them, whether electorally, financially, or other. In this case, if you're a politician who gets a lot of money from the gun lobby, dismissing mass shooters as being driven only by evil, and by nothing else, seems like a sure way to deflect scrutiny away from your own policy decisions and onto "Satan" where it belongs. That will keep more guns flowing throughout the country, because after all, if you believe in evil as an active, powerful supernatural force, then you know you can't stop evil from happening in the first place, but you can stop people overcome by evil afterwards with a good guy's guns. Or so I've heard.

That's what police reports are really intended to do: tell as much truth as they can afford to, with the underlying goal of covering their ass and deflecting blame or responsibility for anything that went wrong, and massaging the message as needed to achieve that. At its core, the police report is an exercise in establishing favorable narrative, much of it driven by FOP considerations to protect what they see as their members' rights. I'm not saying anything like "all police reports are a pack of lies." That statement on its face is not true. I'm sure they occupy a spectrum that includes telling the actual unvarnished truth about whatever happened. What I am saying is that we've learned so much about how some police reports have doctored the truth or even flat out lied about what really happened, I believe we should never trust a police report prima facie as being the unimpeachable truth.

So because you believe the kid was evil, and based on what you read in my post—assuming you read it at all—you would agree that because they are evil, there's nothing we can do to stop mass shooters, and all we can do is kill them after the fact, and pray to god to touch men's hearts so they won't become mass shooters in the first place. Does that pretty much sum it up?

I've been thinking more about what Abbott said, that he considers the shooter to be "pure evil". "Evil" is a handy term to use in cases like mass shootings because for a lot of people, "evil" is code for "Satan". That's because evil, like its antithesis "good", is a religious concept, not a behavioral concept. The religious people who still make up the strong majority in this country believe that "good" and "evil" are personality traits endowed by supernatural beings which control our behavior. God makes us do good; Satan makes us do evil. So those people who believe this was an act of evil, specifically, seek to portray mass shootings as a spiritual failing, not a physical or social or policy failing. This has huge and obvious implications for gun policy in America. If we have a strong belief in the presence and power of "evil"—if we believe that there is some supernatural being who is the source of all evil, a being who influences evil and leads people to act in an evil manner—well, then, there's nothing we can do to stop it. Whatever power we might have must pale against the power of this supernatural being. So, all we can do in reaction is to wait for the evil to happen, and then shoot down or lock up the bad guys driven by the evil, and trust that those bad guys will eventually receive their truly just punishment after they die. That is, in fact, the exact policy that civilizations have been following for centuries, and which many—including the United States of America—still employ today. On the other hand: if we believe that people act in a certain way for a reason—whether it is a physical problem such as brain damage or mental illness that leads people to do really bad things for no apparent or logical reason; a systemic failure that creates an incentive to behave badly; and /or a policy failure that makes such weapons so easy and convenient to obtain—then we can fully embrace the idea that we can do something to stop this behavior by changing the systems, and then actually undertaking the hard work to do so. The key difference is that in the former case, the only way to combat the problem of mass shootings is to petition really hard to the Supernatural Being of Good to defeat the Supernatural Being of Evil, and to touch the hearts of men to be good. You know—thoughts and prayers. With the latter case, the way to combat the problem is to apply scientific rigor and analysis to understand the physical problems that lead to inexplicable bad behavior, to understand the systemic problems that lead to warped incentives, or to understand how policy failures enables one to easily carry out this act, and then test and improve the methods to combat these things that lead to the behavior. In the former case, we push off the responsibility of change to beings we trust but cannot interact with, and simply wait and hope for results. In the latter case, we take on the responsibility for change unto ourselves and undertake the hard work to make results happen. That's the policy consideration at hand, as it relates to mass shootings. So what's it going to be? Do we carry on with the traditional policy of reacting to acts of evil with thoughts and prayers? Or should we try something else for a change?

The sad thing that occurs to me is that it might be only foreign journalists who can effectively ask this question and stick with it when the politicians deflect. I think part of it might be the access issue. Deflection works on American journalists because they have to think about a long game in which they have to protect access to Washington insiders for themselves and their news employers. Access is a must-have for them: If access is withheld from them, their effectiveness as political journalists reporting to Americans is severely damaged, and their employers have to mend fences to regain that access. Foreign journalists don't have really to worry about that: access is a good thing for them and a strong nice-to-have, but in the end, they can always report on American politics back to their country without having access to Washington insiders.

Ironic, maybe, but not surprising, since the focus was on right-handed pitching for most of the tank.

The rest of the season.

And how about a .300-hitting Miggy? Who offered that one up as one of their bold predictions?

Miggy with the walkoff!

Here's a pretty fun article in the Athletic if you have access to it. It's a guy's attempt to track every baseball used in a selected major league game, i.e., Tigers and Guardians. Spoiler alert: the number of baseballs used in this game was 115.

I'll bet he noticed the pain and tried to pitch through it a long time before this.

Yeah, I get it, it's the prevailing mentality of young men competing together to defeat an opponent, whether we're talking about sports or we're talking about war. The individual is expected to fully subsume himself to the group's goal, and to do anything, including perform through pain, to help achieve the goal, because god help you if you admit you're hurt and pull yourself out of commission, only to lose by the margin that would have turned on your contribution.

Not 100% sure, but I think you're agreeing with me that the messaging here is probably influenced by state politics. I also notice in the tweet that the original statement was attributed to the director of the Texas DPS, while the statement changing that story was issued by the Texas DPS, not the director. I wonder whether that's an intentional or accidental distinction. If it's accidental it might mean nothing, but if it's intentional, that would mean the institution DPS would be at odds with and is contradicting the messaging of its director.