gehringer_2

No soup for you.

well - can't cut this any closer....

If there hadn't already been so many already, Lange turning into a pumpkin would be the last straw for this team!

well, more a squib than a boom, but maybe enough - if Lange is on tonight.

Maton hits the breaking ball.

Ford probably lost the election over pardoning Nixon. Argues no-one will make that mistake again.

It's beyond weird how one one hand, we can keep getting such gut it out, fight your way through performances from pitchers no-one ever heard of, and other hand it doesn't matter whether the bat came here from trade, college, HS, international, they all come to the Tiger org to die.

there were reports the DOJ had a meeting with the Congressional leadership (the so-called gang of eight). Speculation was to tell them about a Trump indictment. EDIT: Aaannd there it is. Indictment just popped onto the front page of the NYT.

I know it's beating a dead horse, but it keeps happening. Someone needs to write "Stop taking middle-middle fastballs for strike 1" on the bill of all of Torkelson's caps. And if this is coaching, it needs to change.

You remember how Pedro Martinez looked at Casey Mize pitch and said he was going to break down? I remember a Sports Doc before the draft that watched Zion play, even broke down the way he walked around in street clothes, and said he was trouble. Maybe the guy was FOS and it's just been blind bad luck with Zion, but I've always remembered that.

I don't know if A^2 was just in a clear patch but they said yesterday that Detroit air was supposedly very bad but vis here was fine - infact we drove out to Pickney area and the sky was fairly blue everywhere. Now today it's definitely a lot worse - almost no blue to the sky.

There has been a lot of back and forth at various councils since, but for practical purposes, for the Western Churches most canon was set under Augustine's leadership in the 4th century. The big change after that came when the Protestant movement switched their choice of OT authority from the Septuagint (Greek) to the Masoretic Text (Hebrew) - (KJV reflects this) . For the Protestants reformers, this helped remove authority for some RCC doctrines they didn't like that were supported in the Duetorecanon/Apochrypha since those book are not in the Masoretic Canon . The Protestant reformers may have also viewed the Masoretic text as more 'authentic' than the Septuagint (the Greek OT which contains the Dueterocanon).

While never Orthodox by choice or practice, I was born into it, which left me with sort or a positive disposition about it just because of it's history and persistence. But the abject failures of the Orthodox churches in Russia and the ex-Yugoslavia just go to prove no matter what its roots, any institution anywhere can go seriously wrong.

Looking back from today's perspective, Graham's work against the election of JFK out of fear that electing a Catholic would deliver the presidency to the Pope seems hopelessly Quixotic. Graham later in life did say he had regrets about his involvement with politics and political figures. But whether you think someone's theology is broken and whether you think they are a grifter are separate questions at different levels. And it can go the other way as well. Just because a guy is a grifter doesn't mean he can't preach anything that has some truth. It's being able to get close enough to what people will recognize as some piece of the truth that is what makes the grift work.

'cause the 'air filters' need to be changed?

Was Billy G even really a 'televangilist' though? A lot of his events were televised but I don't remember that he ever did any kind of scheduled TV where it was the major focus, though I could be wrong. He did do a regular radio program at one point. The granddaddy for TV would have to be Fulton Sheen I suppose. Sheen had all the standard RCC hang-ups about human sexuality but I don't know that anyone ever accused him of being a grifter. Maybe the 1st, last and only for whom that's still true?

Biblical literalism is good training for this.

Yup. 5 guys started 60 games for the Nuggets. All drafted in the 1st 15, except Jokic. 🤔

Indeed he is.

Yup - the whole DeSantis schtick revolves around it not being enough to win elections and carry policy, but you have to destroy your opposition - literally remove them from their existence: Freedom defined as not ever having to even hear from anyone that opposes you. A simply terrible, totalitarian, approach to politcs and a sad commentary on the emotional and moral sense of anyone that supports him. DeSantis could walk on to one the Russia Today news sets where the talk of genocide and nuclear annihilation of enemies runs 24/7 and find himself perfectly at home.

MBS is a difficult story. At the micro level, he is a creep; at the macro level, he's busy planting every kind of seed that will eventually undermine both the Saudi Theocracy and his own Monarchy, so we don't want to impede his progress on that part if we can help it.

Yeah - a lot of ways to drill even deeper into this and pickup some more specific things at maybe finer grain. There is solid research that GOP voters score higher as apprehensive personalities and living in cities probably can act somewhat to force an apprehensive personality into a higher engagement level with other people, which in turn might modify their world view, so I don't argue the base the premise, but I think you can break it down more. For instance, I don't know if the rural/urban fear axis is the best correlate. For instance, not all Midwest Farmers have always been conservative - out state dems were once strong in MI and you have the example of the Farmer/Labor party in MN. And TBF, many 'suburban' areas are the most strongly conservative even though life in those areas still involves a lot of public interaction - certainly much more than in truly agricultural areas. But the people that now live in US cities are from the same gene pool that lived in US rural areas before the urban migrations yet the segregation in US politics is clearly geographic so something is driving a clear difference in world views based on geographies as opposed to say - genetics: Two suggestions to narrow down subfactors: The first is very close to the original premise, but tweak it just a little. It's not population density - meeting strangers per se, but population diversity - meeting *strangeness*. By and large US suburban areas are just as segregated as US rural areas. So make the analysis not numbers of strangers in general, but strangers who also look/talk/feel different and I think the correlation between the politics and geography tightens. Or another way to put it is that living in segregation is going to condition people (mostly white) to a higher level of cultural discomfort around anything that departs from their Whiteness even in people who have no explicit ideological predisposition to overt racism. The cultural piece operates at a much more subliminal level. The idea being a more specific cultural kind of fear/disorientation rather than just broad fears of anything new. The second is religion. And I think there is some chicken and egg intertwining of the two effects, but white religious conservatism is strongly geographically correlated. I think here the original premise about urban living per se may apply more directly and again it goes to cultural segregation. It's easy to be religiously doctrinaire when everyone around you agrees with you. Harder when faced daily with people that circumstance forces you to acknowledge as your peers don't see any particular validity to your parochial truths - add the effect of cross cultural romance and marriage in cosmopolitan areas as another moderating driver. To me the effect is easy enough to understand, but I don't really have a good clue as to why conservative strains of Christianity have such particular appeal today in the West and Upper midwest rural areas. I don't know if that's always even been the case. In the South, ties between the 'Lost Cause', conservative religion and racism are easier to understand/trace. A little side note on that intermarriage point. The old Ottoman empire was a place with a lot of cosmopolitan cross interaction between different ethnic and religious groups yet people never overcame their prejudices about each other. I think the difference again being religion and the strict taboo against inter-religious marriage. Christians and Muslims lived shoulder to shoulder with each other in the Ottoman world for centuries, but they did not marry one another. The communities forced themselves to keep each other at that minimum arms-length distance where they could still more easily deny each other's humanity when it was politically expedient.

I think it is natural that in any period when QB salaries are growing more rapidly than salaries in general, there will probably be push back from ownership down through orgs to reduce risk to expensive QBs by reducing their running and a result will be a swing back toward drop back passers. There is probably some cyclic character to all this.

Not to worry. The Saudi's will hold it until it's worth about half what they paid, then bail.