gehringer_2

Hard to accept that India may be better organized and socially coherent that the US isn't it? It's probably not your father's India anymore, and it certainly isn't our fathers' US! The bigger weakness in the Indian achievement is likely not the numbers claim but that they have used a lot of what is probably not very effective vaccine stock - having relied initially on Russian and other less well performing products. It looks like one big stick they used was that they made vaccination mandatory to get on a train.

We have airbrushed away King's economic radicalism to make him more palatable as a cultural icon. With both US parties having capitulated to big money interests (including Obama) I would say it's hard to guess where he would come down today - but for sure Bernie Sanders is probably as good a guess as any.

the authoritarian side has always been happy to suppress speech as a political act, but the idea of suppressing speech as a therapeutic act seems to me (at least) to be a marker of 21st century progressivism. The repudiation of the more classic Americanism of "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" comes to us from sectors that are on what I would call the authoritarian left. Now in this case we can probably safely say the suppression at heart is still for political reasons and the therapeutic claim is simply cynical cover. But maybe in the broader sense that is the case on both sides. I suppose that it's probably true that even on the part of the progressive segments that have given us this therapeutic speech limitation paradigm that at a deeper level it's just a re-emergence of same kind of leftest thought control authoritarianism expressed in Leninism or Maoism. And it goes back to the other related question I don't really have an answer for, which is the separate but almost converse problem of demonstrably false speech having powerful economic platforms exactly because it is comforting/therapeutic to those listening.

The left has itself to blame for promulgating the idea that speech in and of itself can be oppressive. Maybe they are even correct on some levels - it's not a trivial topic, but either way the right would not have thought it themselves.

Would tend to argue he has been unhappy with the offers he had received. Water under the bridge at this point but still, wouldn't it be funny if the Tigers' actaully had been the best offer he got before the lockout?

you also had a FO that couldn't/wouldn't build an O-line; strangely committed to a mediocre LT and an undersized Center.

Asshattery on 1st Street. All I can hope is that this kind of juvenile conservative performance modeling helps drive Roberts further from the conservative camp.

Harbaugh dances to a tune only he can hear. I don't know whether he is staying or going but I can probably guarantee none of the talking heads out there have any real idea either. I tend to think he stays. I think to Harbaugh, MI feels like his place in the world. Now if something drastic happened - like a situation where the regents or admin put MI in some kind of untenable competitive situation where he just didn't want to coach anymore - sure I could see him leaving, but I don't think the possibility of that, while real, is more than tiny.

Just a shame there aren’t more Buffalos in the league

quite possible. Or they are just not in any hurry. Interestingly enough, straightening out the Athletic dept has been a major success under Schlissel, notwithstanding that he seemed to have little or no interest in it.

the problem with prior 'infection' is that the term doesn't bring any quantitative value with it. The clinicians have more confidence about vaccination because they know exactly what the patient got and what the statistics for the response to it are. If someone had bothered to do the same for positive cases we might might now a lot more about what kind of clinical presentation is associated with what kind of subsequent immune response, but that information seems to be lacking. Right now I'm not sure anyone can say much for certain about what having had a a positive test means in terms of your immunity. There are are lots of assumptions that can be made, probably a lot of them may be pretty pretty good ones, but is there much data? I think that is why there is hesitancy in accepting 'positive test' as signifying as much as a vaccination.

LOL - Exxon sending out poorly trained maintenance people out two days before Christmas to fix a leak who subsequently blew up the hydrotreater at Baytown refinery which has resulting something like +150000 bbl a day of lost production has probably contributed as much to the increase in gas prices as anything Biden has done.

Buffalo made the Wings look pretty good. Wish there were more teams that did....

LOL - Schlissel caught wetting his wick with a staffer. If anyone wants to apply to be UM president, the gig is open.

This what happens when people can’t do the maths. Compared to other human activities such as farming and urban development, the areas needed for solar power are actually small.

If you have farmland in a farming area and you don’t want to work it, you can usually find someone else who will and that will usually pay your taxes and then some. Odds are at the least you aren’t going end up with some kind of terrible financial burden because of the evil state’s intransigence.

Get Well Bert!

yeah - that's a good point also. But be that as it may, it has to be demoralizing when you can't get even 2 out out of each 1000 people in the area to show up. But it is also cultural. I would guess a lot of Angelinos feel they have 'moved on' from football as being a lagging cultural institution. 🙄 Maybe enough winning could bring them back - who knows?

The times news staff is OK but the op-ed page is the worst example of false equivalencism going anywhere..

Actually a better example that goes to directly to the argument about the employee's active choice not to protect themselves outside the workplace would be hearing protection. You may go home every night and blast Twisted Sister on your ear buds at 110db, but OSHA still requires your employer to provide you with an 80db time weighted sound environment or provide hearing protection, even if it's doing nothing to actually preserve your hearing because you are killing it on your own time. The basis of the objection has to be in the nature of the compliance required. In the above case you will be required to wear ear plugs where it's noisy, but what if OSHA said you needed to have your ears surgically modified? The latter clearly fails a reasonableness test, the former does not. So where do you place a vaccination on that scale and is there any kind of bright line to make it clear?

No question Yzerman is not is an enviable position - which is why I put it as 'wondering'. Do you just cut or buy out a couple guys and call a couple fresh bodies guys up? The cupboard is not exactly brimming at GR and if the guys don't justify your confidence it ends up a step backward. I'll tell you what most drives my crazy: When a opponent receives a pass or digs out a puck along the boards and a Wing player is there - even one within a single step, the Wing will start backing down the ice instead of closing to check. You watch the Wings and it's like they are completely averse to fighting for possession. No other team in the NHL runs away from the other team in the center ice zone like that. You don't have to play like Kronwall did and put yourself at risk of getting your bell rung, but you can't expect to succeed at NHL hockey if you won't engage an opponent and fight for puck possession. And the other side of that same coin is that the Wings forecheck is pathetic. Now part of it is that the Wings are generally slow and afraid to get caught back, but tonight even Larkin's line was playing that way. If that is Blashill, then he needs to go, if it's the players, someone or something needs to kick them in the arse.

OK - fair enough if you can make a reasoned argument that a vaccination is different in kind to the other kinds of behavioral compliance that OSHA's authority does indeed extend to in the workplace, but that would not be because of anything that does or doesn't go on outside the workplace - it would be because the rule in some other definable way is defective - extends past OSHA powers. IOW it may be a badly arrived at rule, but not because I face the same risk outside the workplace. OSHA clearly does have the power to regulate a worker's exposure to a risk in the workplace that he/she may also face outside the workplace. That is not a criterion that proscribes OSHA's regulatory powers.

Then we'll need to take a flyer on some bodies from GR because this group is plateaued.

Tonight they looked very comfortable about losing. If I'm Stevie Y i'm wondering if I have to move some guys just to shake up what's looking like complacency setting in.

a full minute 6 on 3, no goal. Well, good to see they are finally playing more consistently - now just as bad at home as on the road.