gehringer_2

GOP, WWE? Can you tell the difference?

really? Fundamentalist? You know Jefferson made a translation of the NT where he edited out all the miracles.🤔 The point that Buddha and I are pushing is not that no-one in the history of the world had ever been anti-slavery - you could probably find examples going back to Greece. The issue was that not much had come of it in 3000 yrs so would any practical person (and these were practical men, which is why their revolution took and France's didn't) really envision what the world was going to end up looking like in another 100 yrs when slavery - an institution that dated back to the pharaohs, suddenly did collapse almost world wide? You may be right - they may have been total mercenaries - I guess I don't really care. As I said, I just don't feel any need to pass judgment 250 yrs later on who they were as people. What they did stands on its own for what it was - which was a revolution in national governance systems for its time. One of the things things we consider a core of the Western system of justice is that we separate the person from the act. We don't let you get away with murder just because you love your dog, and we don't convict you of a crime you didn't commit (at least in theory!) even if you are a gang banger. The problem is pop culture (and historians) don't seem to have ever gotten the message. There is a natural human tendency to want to ascribe personal moral worth (whatever that even means) to a person who does a socially useful act when there is never any necessary causal connection between the two. If we would recognize that, we would be less prone to getting into these weeds.

Yup. He probably feels his reach shortening/narrowing - so there is more symmetry between how much he needs to associate with 'popular' people and how much they need to associate with them.

it's what makes drafting players interesting - there's no right answer. You can draft based on what a guy has done and be right or wrong - a guy with tons of NCAA accomplishment might end up as Peyton Manning, or Andre Ware. OTOH, you draft a guy based on great physical attributes and a projected high ceiling, you might get Tom Brady, or you might get Darko!

LOL - Ethereum all hyped about finally getting off the environmental bad list and dumping 'proof of work' for 'proof of stake'. Just what the world needs, going from a system that outgrew what was envisioned as being a truly open distributed control, to one controlled only by the guys who could bring the biggest HW to the table, and now right on to direct control by the biggest existing holders. Crytpo, which early fans saw as some kind of decentralization of banking has taken less than 20 yrs to descend into ordinary top down control capitalism. It has turned into a cute little microcosm lesson in the natural wealth/power consolidating properties of capitalism. Build the boat, float the boat, pull up the boarding ladders. https://www.reuters.com/business/cryptoverse-ether-prepares-epic-merge-quest-eclipse-bitcoin-2022-04-26/

Peaking too early.

Good reason for Manning/Mize to be in FLA.

so I did a little more detailed visual survey of the 'refinery' site and environs via google earth. It does not appear to be what we would call a 'refinery' in the US. It appears to be a fuel blending facility or pipeline terminus for rail loading. It's primarily tankage and a couple of rail loading sidings to handle a couple of dozen rail tankcars at least. There are buildings that could conceivably hold processing facilities (refining process equipment would normally be outdoors, but Russia....), but I see no process furnace stacks or cooling facilities anywhere on the site, which says the only way it can be a processing facility is if all the cooling is done with water from the nearby river - certainly possible - and they only run extremely clean power units - and how likely is that in Russia? The building are more likely for drum or truck packaging/ blending etc or other non-energy intensive operations.

computers do go really fast. No technology limitation on the computer picking the top of the zone based on a guy's load just like the umpire is supposed to. Am curious about what MiLB system actually does though.

It's easy to get deluded into being a home town slappy, but you look at how Ford is going about their entry to the E-vehicle market it seems to be well thought out and thorough-going. And Ford is not even the best of the established operators - the Germans will be heard from, GM etc. The advantage they have all had it that the Japanese have mostly been reluctant, they are still hedging to hold the hybrid market that they think will still emerge as the vehicle of choice - If Toyota had jumped in full EV 5-7 yrs ago with both feet, Tesla would probably already be history.

I think it's definitely a danger sign when a management/manager takes a left turn into an area where they have no expertise. Whether you are impressed by the products or not, the heart of the operation at both Tesla and Space-X was mechanically engineered HW product. What ever mastery Musk has demonstrated as a corporate leader has been finding and managing expertise in HW design and manufacture. I question whether he has a clue how to run Twitter successfully.

There is where I would part company and pretty much what I mean by complexity and nuance. Every human being is the product of their time, of the culture they were born into and the expectations of that culture. I would guess that most of these men, if born today, would be the progressives of today because they would start from *this* cultural ground zero rather than the one they actually started from. From that reference point, what are norms and understandings today were not even visible over the horizon, let alone within reach of practical effort. That's why to me it's pretty much a fool's errand to get embroiled in that discussion. Not one of us has any real concept of the details of the moral universe they viewed. For me it's enough to say that a man made a positive contribution to the movement of society toward a new concept of democratic government. Those were significant and important events in human history, and whether he was a sinner or a saint is really quite immaterial to the fact of the history that was generated by his actions. I think this is a case were maybe we could look to the art world for a little clarity. In general we realize that judging art by the character of the artist is silly. Yes - there are some people who won't play Richard Wagner, but for most people who listen to music, his political views are simply immaterial the music he produced. Picasso was hardly anybody's role model, etc., etc. Let the deeds - the products of action, stand on their own. If Thomas Jefferson abused his slaves, sure repudiate him for that as a man, it simply doesn't change the value of what he brought to world history as a leader a of new movement. They are in the end, unrelated issues. But that said, I do agree that we make a mistake when we lionize the person in place of just celebrating the historical outcome.

That's Cold. Very cold....

"you must be lost young fella...."

because soon every single tweet world wide will come with an ad for one embedded!

I like it.

LOL - exactly what I was thinking!

I don't know if this works better here or in the media meltdown thread - but yet another "Losing is Winning, really!" piece in - you guessed it - the NYT. link to silly op-ed

also, if truly not a set of hardly credible co-incidences, the possibility of multiple murders including 'non-combatant' women and children family members strikes me more likely to be the work of some kind of extremist group rather than UKR agents, especially the knife/axe work. It would be an odd 'ism' that sought no credit however -- unless the play is to build up a 'resume' before announcing their existence.

The idea of an insurgency inside Russia is maybe too good to be true, but OTOH, since overt political action is impossible and the technological means for protected inter-cadre communication/organization exists in ways the old surveillance state never had to deal with, who knows?

Or it wil get buried like Moscoso’s the other night…..🙈🙉🙊

It looks like China might actually try to lock down Beijing. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/world/asia/covid-beijing-shanghai.html Can anyone explain what Xi thinks the end game is to this? Covid is not going to go away - it's going to be become a circulating communicable infection around the globe that virtually everyone is eventually going to have to be become resistant to via exposure or vaccination or be killed by. It's manifestly not just going to disappear like Sars I did so that one day the Epids can just declare 'it's gone'. Unless Xi thinks he can close China - a commercial behemoth - off from people coming and going in and out of the country forever, his policy of absolute containment make zero sense and is doomed to ultimately fail. You can't have aspirations to lead a world economy with closed borders and your people embargoed from international travel. Xi is so fixed on trying to prove that China can to "it" better than the West that he's lost track of the fact that his "it" is a counterproductive policy for his people.

also seeing reports that the Russians attempted to storm the Azovstal plant on Sunday - so much for another Russian piece of BS that they were happy to leave them besieged. The Russians want the win badly the Ukrainians continue to deny them. https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/light-will-defeat-darkness-ukraine-marks-orthodox-easter-amid-misery-of-war-20220425-p5afs1.html among others...

If a refinery is 'burning', it could still be staged though it would require great care not to do any real damage, I would probably argue enemy action -it could get too damn expensive for a false flag and could take months to fix. A pipeline attack, or even an odd storage tank, sure - relatively easy to fix (or do without in the case of a tank) and a burning tank makes for spectacular footage even if it's small (tiny really) potatoes operationally. Maybe the bigger oddity though would be doing a false flag in two locations - why bother with that level of detail?

the difference is that Brett was wrong (stupid rule but he had violated it) and Schwarber is right! Good for him. I have to say it didn't look completely spontaneous though - like maybe he had been stewing over it from before that at bat - the gestures were so well thought out - he was so careful to not contact Hernandez and he terminated the display and walked off without restraint..... The question is what will the league do? He didn't touch the ump, he didn't require restraint, he left the field after being ejected. If they suspend him it's a pure admission they can't tolerate a little truth because he didn't violate any rules other than arguing balls and strikes and getting ejected.