gehringer_2

Bolton with an asinine Editorial in WaPo complaining that Trump 'just needs to open the Strait.' I'm sure he would have by now if he could have, but he can't, and that's the fact on the ground. I don't know where these neo-cons get their fantasy ideas about the ease with which the US Military can just conjure their international management wet dreams into existence.

Well, I certainly don't get it. These people seem desperately to want to get back to the 1950's. By that standard we are still about 100million people over target. 🤷‍♂️

facts not in evidence on this one. but yes, I absolutely will grant you that the kind of atrocities committed by Hamas are beyond the pale (btw they are all the exact same ones committed in at the turn of the century in the Turkish nationalist frenzy against the Armenians that I heard about from 1st hand eye-witnesses even as a child.. so you have no surprises for me on that front.).There are some uniquely grotesque and evil ideologies/mindsets that come out the ME that are absolutely hard to fathom. I will even grant you the old saw about "two wrongs don't make a right" goes pretty much out the window in war. But what I will stand on is that States with more power have more responsibility and Israel is trying hard to fail on that score. The attitude that populations are grass that needs to be periodically 'mowed' with high explosive in perpetuity is a pretty terrible mindset also.

I agree is not genocide, there is a reasonable case to made it has crossed the line into war crimes though - a situation Trump seems intent on having America follow them into in Iran.

Not even talking about Gaza - they are and have been regularly dispossessing people and property on the West Bank without recourse.

If they go out, we will probably find out something is wrong with Duren - but that's still no excuse for leaving him out there if he is compromised when Reid seems better able to hold his own.

My grandfather, who came to this country in flight from genocide, would always get impatient at his fellow emigres when they would talk old homeland grievances, he would say "You are an American now. You came here to leave all that behind!" When the old world grievances of emigres become issues in US politics it never helps America, whether it's Cuba, Israel, Palestine, Iraq, whatever.

I suppose anything is possible in that asylum, but he is so mercurial and fit to rages at people that I have to doubt anyone would risk posting anything in his name without on the spot approval. Plus the contradictions post to post? An aide would be playing with fire doing that.

Except that that is exactly what Israel is doing today in the West Bank. The State of Israel has bought and paid for the critique they are getting. Having sympathy with anyone is dubious when there are no good guys. 🫤

can you pre program VTT for all caps or does he just have to shout at it?

Yeah - It would be hard to believe he is not in the room real time with whoever is actually typing the keystrokes/constructing the GIFS - I think we can assume it is all originating in what is left of his brain.

It doesn't break on a particularly consistent pattern. Just as an example, it's GOP candidates for Michigan Regent seats that have been the most outspoken in opposition to the shout out to the Palestinian activists in the UM commencement speech while it is a board with a majority of pretty mainstream Democrats that has been roundly criticized for allowing the mood on campus to become toxic/dangerous to Jewish students in the first place.

And what's worse for the GOP is that in surveys, inflation expectations are even higher, over 4%. That means that much like at the end of Biden's term, people aren't going to believe it even if inflation starts down again.

One of the things that has happened in Israel is that public opinion there has hardened - the radicalism of Hamas and Hezbollah has in turn created a reaction in the Israeli general population sufficient to create a majority of support for Netanyahu's terrible policies. It's sort of the same phenomenon we see here with Americans supporting terrible cruel Trump policies. I don't know what the answer is when whole societies lose their moral bearings. In the ME it's been an ever descending spiral for my entire lifetime. Arabs cheer in the street when Israelis die, eventually Israeli's don't care how many Arabs they kill. And we've imported those mentalities onto the DOD with Hegseth cheering at killing people with same kind of glee as a dedicated Hamas radical. Hard to see it all ending on any good note.

Apparently Real Estate Tycoon Trump has never had to take care of an old building. Old buildings are always falling apart a little bit here and there. You fix this, you fix that, you don't bulldoze a wing because it needs to be spackled.

yeah - that makes sense, but you wonder about him nibbling the hand that feeds him here - even if it's a pretty little nibble. Maybe at this point he feels like he's good enough he can make a secure career in AAA for some number of years with or without the Tiger's support, and whatever time he gets in the majors is playing with house money.

I think he's finally gotten so besotted that he's starting to cross lines with real costs. The Jesus pic, and not\w this. There isn't much that GIs hate more than this kind of thing.

So on the ESPN Tiger site right now, Buster has an interview with Boras. So what Boras says is that the deal here is that they did not use an arthroscope on Skubal, they used a new micro device (come kind of fiber optic micro canula) that isn't much larger than a hypodermic needle. That is why they are looking for less than 'std' return possibility. The story is the new even-less-invasive-than-a-'scope treatment tech provides a possibility for faster recovery.

I thinks it's odd enough that there must be some subtext to it.

Along with the softer ball, probably keeping it simple and just lowering the stitching would be a nice incremental trial to do. And while I know this one gets little or no support, I would move the mound back the equivalent of maybe 3 mph which is about 18" (~10msec@97mph). If I've shuttled my digits right, that would make the time of flight of a 100mph pitch equal to the current time of flight of 97mph pitch across 55ft. Those things would just take you back part of the distance to conditions that already existed in past and so shouldn't create too huge a set of dislocations.

I'm sorry I don't remember where but I just read a long piece about the generational divide in the US wrt support of Israel and the journalist's report that in his survey of Israeli opinion people realized it was a problem but thought it would be transient. I have my doubts.

this is an interesting thought experiment. You have two effects to consider for two balls otherwise with equal size and weight but different spin moments, The first is that the ball with more spin moment will require more energy from the hand to impart a given revolution rate - more moment would mean less spin imparted *if* it is true that the rotational energy supplied by the hand is at saturation/max - I have no idea if it is or not. So now you look at the second effect, which is that the ball with higher moment will lose rotation more slowly in transit for an identical amount of surface drag (since the balls are otherwise the same), and thus will still be spinning faster, and still breaking more, out to 60' 6" ft. So one key is how much does the spind decay in transit with the current ball? Is it a significant % where a change could make a difference; and another possible key is whether a pitcher can spin a harder to spin ball just as fast at release or not, and if not how much less? (i.e. is the spin moment of the ball a limiting factor in the pitcher's ability to spin it or are other factors more significant) And then of course you have whole second set of questions as to what effect trying to spin a harder to spin ball has on arm health. Does the extra resistance protect the arm more or the extra stress applied damage it more? Highly multivariate system.

The thing is, even if overcome that and you do restructure the game so that globally, a team would be more successful (and know it) over a season because it would have a clear improvement in injury experience that would be greater than the value of more K's to the staff, will the pitchers themselves still *always* see it in their *immediate* best interests to strike guys out if they can and damn the risk to themselves? Thus for instance even go to private coaches if their team decided not to do pitch maximizing work with its staff (just as an extreme theoretical example...). So maybe to continue along where this reasoning leads, you have not only make contact less damaging, maybe you have to make strike-outs much harder to achieve - at least against a larger % of the batter population, so you'd be where the game was when you had to pitch to a Stan Musial and you knew you were wasting your time trying to K him - all you could do was try to keep him off balance enough so he didn't barrel it up well. Two possibilities come to my mind in this direction: moving the mound back to give hitters more time to see pitches; and lowering the stitches to reduce achievable break. Pitchers would have rely more on change of speed and location sequencing to keep guys of balance for barrels as opposed to 'here it is you can't hit it' swing and miss.

More seats would also reduce the electoral college imbalance created by the Senate. I'd like to see them go to 500 reps. Nice round number but not that much harder to manage than 435. Even better would be floating the senate to 200 with the additional 100 seats allotted by population. Much bigger lift of course - but it's on my list with the Constitutional amendments to reverse CU and gerrymandering.

yup - the difficulty with proportional systems is that they drive toward a net 'at large' system were people are not attached to particular geographies. That can be good and bad, but I think the bad outweighs the good. As an example of the worst result of at-large representation you had Detroit, where when the City's Black population started to grow at then end of WWI, they shifted to at-large election of all city council members to preserve an all white city council. That outcome was not only racist, but resulted in a politics were no-one spoke up for preservation of neighborhoods. Believe it or not, it took until 2009 before the charter was finally changed back to a district system (mostly).