gehringer_2

everything has to do with culture. The number one mistake Americans generally making looking out at the world is thinking every one else thinks like we do - they don't. Now on a tactical level, I agree with everything in your post, but in your earlier post you referred to them being 'open' to certain tactics and that 'openess' has a cultural dimension as it relates to what kind of policies are considered socially comfortable and the choices they make within the overal policy and that is where I was going. For example, you can remain militarily non-alligned, but still take much stronger public positions on things than India does. There is a reticence toward what we might call 'moral clarity' there that goes beyond the tactical need of their non-aligned status. That is all in the way they approach it. To draw the contrast, I'll make the analogy to realpoliitik. The Indian non-alignment formulation is logically, tactically, along the same lines as Kissinger and realpolitik, but there is often a high level of social discomfort in the West - esp in the US, over the practice of realpolitik and lots of folks consider Kissinger to be morally repugnant even when they may have to admit he may be tactially sound at points. That's not to say I'm attempting to justify the US as having a more moral foriegn policy in the end - that's different set of arguments. It's just that we are at the other pole. We are a very 'Manachean' oriented culture - *everything* has to have a wrong and right side for us - and it doesn't have one we force one on it. And that can be just as bad in the way it leads us to demonize our adversaries and diefy our friends to the point we often don't make very sound judgments about things that maybe mostly grey (thinking in particular of the history of our ME policies). So that's where my take comes from - that way a society judges its own foreign policy conduct has a cultural aspect to it. Heck - at the extreme end, all we have to do is look at Russia to see how ambitious cultural conditionding can drive how a foreign policy plays in a society. But whatever.... Back at the practical level, you're spot on that India is snared by the legacy of chosing to equip their military with Russian hardware. They regret that both policy and technology wise, but it's not an easy thing to turn around, and kaee rupee. They want desperately to be better able to meet the Chinese challenge, but don't want to make relations with China even worse by being seen as too much in bed with the US DOD - assuming they were even disposed to.

TTBDNS

Nope.

Single, double, single. Two score. Nat's take the lead.

ooops. Jeimer sitting off speed and got it.

97.1 broadcast radio is maybe 20 sec ahead of my Bally video feed from DirectTV/ATT. That's about typical for here. The same radio feed that comes from the INet is usually another 30 sec or more behind that.

from the small amount of reading of Hindu lit I've done, there is a sort of ethos deep in Indian culture that I think it's hard for those of us steeped in the way we do morality in the Judeo-Christain system to wrap our head around. I'm not going to get this quite right but it's sort of a sense that you are justified in doing the thing your destiny has set you up to do. Or maybe "do your job man" and you're justified by doing it, release yourself from your judgments about it. If the Indian PM sees his job/India's destiny to position India thusly, then that transcends the kind of tranactional morality we would apply to the details. In the B'Ghita Arjuna is concerned that war is evil and he should not take part, Krishna basically tells him he is a warrior and *his* higher morality is to be the best warrior. That's not generally a WWJD take.

yeah - Englert's pixie dust supply seems about out.

no problemo!

He's getting a little like Anibal Sanchez - strong starts but the wheels come off completely at the end of the string. You just have to resign yourself to having a short leash - if you don't get an inning out of him you might have - so what? Tigers BP was always so bad when Sanchez was here that they always let him go too long. No excuse to do that now.

tough play on hard hit ball, you don't have a lot of time to take whatever extra steps you need to work around the lights and a park on the road never becomes 2nd nature.

maybe it's the darker shirts but Jeimer looks a little trimmer.

The question is "Whose Greed"? TPTB love to blame it on greedy serfs and their grubby socialist labor unions driving wages, heaven forbid you point the camera back on them for driving prices. 😱

May or may not be signficant that Colin Kahl is leaving the Admin to go back to Stanford. Supposedly he and Blinken have been at odds over levels of support for Ukraine.

TBF, Germany has made a turnaround since the Defense Minister was replaced in Jan.

Y

I have mixed feelings about Vierling. He's getting rave OF reviews but to my eye, it's all about his speed, I don't think his glove skills are all that good, but if in the end he gets to enough balls and make some easy plays look hard I'll be glad to forgive him for it! and yes - the bigger problem is that he is on a 3 for 37.

I don't know if he's quick enough on this skates to become a good pressuring forechecker, but sure, I'd take that kind of outcome - it's a big need on the current team.

Fair enough - and of course no-one knows what Russia is going to do. Putin could reverse himself, his position could collapse and what comes after could be better or worse, he could simply remain an intractable enemy of the West in all things, his army could turn on him, or not. We know from history that a dictactorship like Putin's is often perfectly stable right up until the moment it is not. Anyone who says they know is lying. But in the most fundamental sense, he is still the primary driver in this situation and everyone else's strategy is forced to be reactive. Clearly everyone hopes that an outright defeat or at least severe enough set-backs on the ground will eventually make Putin's continued control in Russia untenable and the resolution of the conflict with be a peice of the re-organization of the Russian state government, but hope is all it is.

it basically all comes down to Ilitch not being a strongly competitively motivated owner. If his own inner demons made wins more important to him, what we or Hinch or Miggy think about the situation or the nominal amount of money Cabrera is worth wouldn't matter. C'est la vie.

well, Kiermaier hadn't been until this year in Toronto at 35. Has anyone checked his hat size?

And the level of pressure may also depend on Carpenter and possibly Malloy. The alternatives are always a factor.

I just find him frustrating. He's sort of a quintessential AAAA player. He has a certain skill set that works at lower levels, it doesn't play well at the NHL level but he shows no sign of moving on from it. How many hundred times did Veleno start the same rush up along the boards only to be met and erased by the NHL caliber defender he can't beat waiting for him? Result being just another give away. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? That's been Joe's game.

this is correct, and TBF I don't think there are many voices criticizing Cabrera for taking his money. This is absolutely on the team for not giving him the DFA - I would guess from the reporting he won't accept being DL'd.

When you consider all the Hall of Famers that got cut by teams back in the day because they would not carry them near the end of their careers even when they were still moderately productive, it's quite the contrast. You can argue that the game today may be of higher quality because the athletes are better, but I'm not sure some of the old time team managements didn't have more competitive drive than today's neo-billionaire owner class. Or just for the thought experiment to a more recent case - can you even dream that George Steinbrenner would carry a Cabrera on one his Yankee teams? He'd have cut DiMaggio if he were performing at Cabrera's level.