gehringer_2

China's idee fixe is Taiwan. Once they are there, there won't be a whole lot the US and our allies will be able to do about it. This one is 100% about deterrence - making Taiwan such a porcupine that China will never see a point where the ledger adds up on the positive side for the attempt. But this means making big investments up front to meet a threat which will be seen as purely speculative. So in the end the problem for Taiwan is less about technology and relative military advantage between the US and China, than about their own and US politics being up to those investments.

But did he make it part of his platform in '32? In the US that's the kind of move one could only make once firmly in power. If Trump proposed any serious kind of gun ban now, Harris would approach a minimum of 350 EVs.

As this week runs toward it's close, with Bret Baier admitting that Harris "may have gotten" what *she* wanted from her Fox interview, Trump cancelling half his events and crapping the bed in the ones he did make it to, and Stormy Daniel's name resurfacing to capture a news cycle or two, if the polls don't show some movement, then one of two things must be true: Either it's no longer possible to poll a US election accurately, or political campaigns have become ineffective exercises in futility. And of course as always - maybe both.

That is one possible read, but I tend toward an alternate view. Trump is stuck in 1980 - either because of age or vascular driven neurologicala deficit leading to loss of frontal lobe integration or just because of his basic narcissistic inward view, his view of reality is fixed/regressed back to his golden boy swinging NYC idol days circa 40 yrs ago. He understands everything that was true then to be what is true now, so in his political calculation he can't lose the election because he is playing to the overwhelming majority of what that America was. His majority can't be outvoted unless people are cheating. His advisors don't know what they are talking about with their constant carping on him to go here and do this. He certainly cares if he wins because even through his thick skull it has penetrated that if he loses he's going to jail.

Not to mention that each one of those non-sequitor responses likely evaporated a quantity of kW equivalent to a mature oak tree.

I expect a lunch with Hinch to precede his signing somewhere other than Det.

The way he starts out an event with some kind of mental cohesion and then sort of deconstructs before one's eyes a few minutes later is getting pretty striking.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse.... Diamond has a naming rights deal with FanDuel. Bally Sports Det is now FanDuel. Ay Caramba! - - de mierda! Well, we can still hope Diamond never gets out of Bankruptcy.

Baier's aggressiveness is going to score her huge points with women. Men and all the male talking heads will watch and completely miss the significance in the subtext. Women will not.

US strike on the Houthis tonight. B2s. Probably some bunker busters https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/16/politics/us-strikes-iran-backed-houthis-yemen/index.html

the Tariff thing also has to be hurting him with a lot of old school green eye-shade mainstreet types who have always been Republican for economic reasons who know it's economic lunacy. They are not a huge cohort but neither side can afford to lose anyone.

I saw a couple of clips - the one where Baier ran Trump's sanitized response and she pushed back hard with what he has actually been saying about attacking his enemies I thought was very effective - the "you know as well as I do"s to Baier that he didn't contradict were exactly what she needed - not even to get MAGA's to vote for her, but to make them think that Trump was guy they didn't really need to spend the energy to vote for.

YAY!

As of now I'm looking at Jace as the first developmental move the Tigers have made that I think is not going to work out. Not that Jace may not hit in the majors, but because he doesn't strike me as adequate or likely to become adequate at 3B. Now I can hope I'm wrong and they see something I don't, but that is where I would put my wager today if forced to. Supposedly, he was a good 2B before they moved him, but I have only what the org has said in that regard so we can judge how much we believe that or not. I'm not sure how you unlock his potential value as a 2B with Keith in front of him, and he apparently has no shot at working out as a SS (which seems odd if can play 2B but has the arm for 3B. Of course the arm he has shown so far is one reason I'm skeptical about him at 3rd and that would carry over at SS) . Not sure where I would go with Jace. I'd be tempted to send him back to Toledo to verify he can be a good 2B, and if he does, then cross the bridge of whether you trade him or try moving Keith to 3B to make room for him there. Or start him on super Util training at AAA.

Will they cut cell/wireless service in the suites as well?

I'm more optimistic. Bottom line is they did win 86 whether did it in a highly nonlinear fashion or not. Not pushing for Bregman in particular but if you add a 4 WAR player to 3B where they got very little value other than the 42 games Vierling started there and a 3 WAR starter (the possibility of which is good whether internally or externally) and consider that you don't really have a single player on the downside of his career other than Javy, I think I'm looking at a 90+ win team. That would put me solidly into win mode management.

they don't even need to care about the after market. The mark-up on the metal value is so large they're basically charging for a air. Trump will have have banked 90% profit before any coins go to aftermarket.

Yup. And the biggest potential for a solution miss is ego in the leadership of both Israel and Iran preventing any win-win from getting off the ground. I'm also a little tired of the talking head view that this is so dangerously increasing the odds of a wider war. It's not. If Iran was willing to do more for its proxies than it has, it would have already done so before both were already so damaged. These operations by Israel are about making Iran's support of proxies more expensive than it is worth to them - a task that many argue the US could have been doing more effectively for the last 20 years but largely punted on. And of course, the other irony is that with the exception of Palestinians (and even some of them), the whole Sunni world wants to see Israel (and the US) succeed in causing Iran to pull back despite whatever lip service they offer in public.

I'm going to guess that black men are skewing poll results and that a lot fewer of them will actually vote for Trump than are enjoying the social rush of claiming they will.

at least good enough to fool 538 anyway (it's showing up there)

at any rate, he's trying to argue for deflation, which is economic suicide for any economy. Again, either he is just ignorant, or pandering (of course, why not both?) doesn't much matter, but you see the appeal of someone who tells people what they want to hear when any responsible person has to tell them they can't have what they'd like. Obviously there is a limit to how much you can do that (as Jimmy Carter found out), but the leader's job is to be enough of an educator in the public sphere to make people understand what their real choices are vs adderall or dementia (or whatever) fueled political fantasy. The irony is in less than 5 minutes you can explain to any lay person why deflation can easily turn into an economic crisis but it seem all candidates have so little faith in the electorate they'd rather finesse economic questions than spend the time - which in turn leaves things wide open for the idiots.. Bill Clinton was probably the last Pres we had who actually liked to lay out options and explain them.

Maybe a neural net where somebody forgot to tie the knots.... (sorry, engineering joke.....)

Regular season seats behind home plate at Yankee stadium run min-max of $400-$5,000(!) per ticket. No clue how much for a playoff.

Hard to know anymore. Last night my Twitter feed went totally bonkers. All RW trash, smut, and posts in Malay (I kid you not!). I muted about two hundred accounts and restarted several times and it finally started to straighten out but it's still pretty goofy.

MBN knows Wings will probably keep him in GR way longer than he'll ever want to be there once he gets there, so why be in a hurry?