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It occurs to me that the false flag idea of Ukraine precipitating the war through aggressive action is designed to convince the Russian people and who cares who else.

Soto may simply not want to commit to Washington at the moment. He may not like the direction they’re going there, at least yet.

Looks like the CDC is finally catching up with us.

I just googled "occupy wall street burning down police station" and I'm coming up empty on that one. But I did run across this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-day-of-protests-occupy-wall-street-faces-police-violence/

Yes, all this, and also, a key difference is that there is a clearly defined chain of authority that occurs at the college and professional levels in which abuse of officials is redressed in some form of sanctions for the abusers, which by extension also means that the very threat of sanctions usually acts as a check on abuse before it even happens. I don't know for sure whether that exists at the Little League level, but it sure didn't when I was trying my hand at umping.

My impression of promotion/relegation is that it works best in a table-type league, where all 20 or 22 or whatever teams all play each other twice. Maybe p/r could work a division-oriented league if you move teams among divisions as other teams come and go, but in a country as geographically vast as the United States, they might get a little hairy. The English soccer pyramid goes something like 20 levels deep, and it’s technically possible for a team to rise all the way from the bottom of that pyramid to the top in any many years as it take to leapfrog levels. An American baseball equivalent might be some town team in Battle Creek eventually working its way up from many levels down to the major leagues in the space of a few decades. I believe that might be technically possible in England even today.

Funny you should bring up this exact thing. Some forty-plus years ago, as a skinny teenager just getting over pimples, I umpired in Warren’s Little League (or WVAC league, the non-affiliated local equivalent) for a few weeks when there was some dispute about a call I made and one of the coaches said he was going to “meet” me “in the parking lot”. He didn’t but it shook me because, who knows, with another person at another time in the future it might go different. I told the umpire supervisor about it later that week and he basically said yeah, you gotta have a thick skin to be an umpire here, not everyone is cut out for it. So I cut myself out of it. One other thing I clearly remember is that the lippiest team of kids I umpired was a girls softball team made up of middle schoolers (actually, at that time, junior high school students). Not only did their coach not control them, he was laughing and egging them on egged them on. I ask him to control them he said, in essence, “what, you can’t handle a bunch of little girls?” That was another data point in the case for “later for this shit”.

Maybe when that war is over that crew can come over and help my city replace the the old lead piping under the streets. The city just took over a year to do a one-mile stretch of Armitage, and they left the street looking like the surface of the moon.

You went totally there! 🤣

I don’t think Palin could ever have gotten the following Trump has. I can’t think of any right-winger who could, given the sum total of Trump’s various attributes. He’s a unique bird in the scheme of things.

Cash money will do that.

Remember how she came out of nowhere two months before the election? Seems like they thought they could sneak her in as a progressive pick before voters could vet her. She revealed herself as both a lightweight and a right-wing kook pretty early on, so I can imagine that she kept some moderate Republicans home on Election Day that year.

Is that what that was about? Something from twenty years ago? Weird.

I wonder whether a lot of the appeal of soccer, outside its simplicity, has to do with national pride. The World Cup is the biggest sports event in the world outside of the northern part of North America. It's a chance for little countries to upset big countries on the pitch. It's pretty thrilling from that perspective.

I'm rewatching The Wire, which I haven't seen since 200-something. It was in 4:3 SD when I first saw it; they've reformatted it to 16:9 SD since. My wife, who is staunchly anti-rerun and will never view anything a second time, even something she hasn't seen in decades, expressed surprise that I would rewatch The Wire because she knows I don't like "cop shows", meaning network procedurals. Procedurals are mostly standalone shows in which each episode is its own story where a crime is introduced, investigated, and resolved within the 44 minutes allotted it. They invariably also have model-beautiful and -handsome law enforcement officer characters; cartoonishly-evil sociopathic criminals; super-advanced technology providing instantaneous information about anybody anytime; and swelling musical cues signaling viewers, "hey, pay attention, this is an important scene". The Wire has almost none of this (outside of, I guess, model-handsome Idris Elba). They have law enforcement characters who look like everyday people; morally ambiguous characters on both sides of the law; investigations that go in fits and starts instead of a straight line up toward a solution); and, mercifully, practically no musical bed under any of the dialogue. Best of all, they seem to have cast exactly the right actors to play the roles. The performances are astonishingly good. I don't like procedurals, but I love The Wire, and I'd recommend anyone who hasn't seen it watch it, and if you have seen it, rewatch it.

Yup.

What the hell are you even talking about??

How do progressives support Eminem?

“Hoodlums”. Huh. He might as well have called them n-bombs.

…

Perhaps the investigators have started banging on their door so now they’re preparing to cooperate.

If it's baseball you want to watch, ESPN+ is going to have dozens of college games every day available to watch starting on Thursday.

They were relied upon?