gehringer_2

at the risk of igniting an old debate, Bryce Young has Doug Flutie written all over him.

when you live in a logic free zone, these things just flow right by.

has there ever been a party in any democratic country anywhere whose politics actually helped to kill their own members (other than in a war)? Is there any precedent to this in the short history of democracy?

I still don't know how much you can hang the double TO on Campbell when Glenn was screaming for it. You either trust your head coordinator or you don't.

well, dollars are fungible. That's like saying the state lottery money 'all goes to schools.' In the final analysis any organization has one pot of money.

don't you think this gets a little nutty though? OK, lets say the 'responsible' gun owners agree to a law that any gun in a house with a minor has be kept in a safe or at minimum with a trigger lock - then how much good is that gun against the home invader coming in the window? It's seems you can't secure guns and still have guns available for the purposes that people say they want them for. Doesn't that argue that getting rid of them (handguns that is) is probably the better course? That the collective security of a less armed society improves everyone's quality of life more efficiently? And maybe it takes 30 yrs to get the numbers low enough the get to where they want to be. So what. I'd still love to be able to leave that legacy to my grandchildren, or even my great grandchildren.

The conventional wisdom on the history is that banning opiates and cocaine was a response to their increasing use in the middle classes - such as was depicted contemporaneously in Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, but in retrospect I wonder if the problem was ever as bad or the solution as effective as touted.

Correct - a natural* political outcome when commuters have more political clout than the affected locals. *natural in the sense of political decisions easy to defend as simply 'serving the larger constituency' despite the obviously disparate racial impact.

The problem is that there is a perfectly sound counter argument, which is that there are plenty of places in the US with plenty of guns and little murder (at least the 'normal' crime kind - again keeping the mayhem events in their own class). That is why it is so easy to get derailed. In a huge sense you are absolutely correct, remove the guns and we don't need to worry about the complexities underlying why they are being used. But OTOH, if you have people on the gun side actually serious about trying to solve the issues around their use, I'm not going to complain about getting to anything that helps keep more kids alive.

but the city pop was approaching 2 million in 1960. The drain was already swirling by 1974 by any definition. another example - much of the prior commercial activity never came back to Grand River or Mi Ave after the '67 riots.

Let's look at the premise of your question. What make you think there has ever been such a thing as integration in America? We have a veneer of social integration of upper class Blacks, but Blacks and whites still live overwhelmingly in separate places and more importantly, with separate legislative representation. We have an integrated social world, but we are still nearly completely segregated residentially, educationally, and politically. Lets look at Detroit. A racist legislative system had been put in place decades before where all city council members were elected at large in order to prevent minorities from gaining council seats. Yet ironically that left every member vying for everyone's votes and there was a large stable black middle class in Detroit that had a measure of political influence. But Detroit was at heart a racist city (lots of southern transplants had come to work in the auto plants and brought it with them) and when the school desegregation case threatened existing geographical segregation in the Detroit schools, ( while the city income tax helped trigger the exodus of small business) it triggered a wave of human and small business emigration that emptied more than half the city's population, destroyed it's tax base, and more importantly also destroyed the value of the financial equity that middle class black families had in their homes ( the average American's biggest investment) as neighborhoods collapsed all around the city. And once that population left, its state and federal political muscle left with it. Is it so hard to fathom that the place and the population left behind ended up in a worse *economic* condition than prior to the civil rights era? Coleman Young achieved his ambition for Black leadership in the city, but it was command of a sinking ship. The saddest of Pyrrhic victories. Its been very insidious that white America has managed to take things away from black America in every act in which it has apparently yielded something to it. And as I've tried to stress, I don't even think a lot of this is motivated by overt political racism - it's just the natural outcome of a geography based representation, residentially segregated populations, and gerrymandering doesn't help! That's why it can be so persistent. It's tied to the core organization of American government.

what makes people not value life? Feeling like you don't have much to live for. *Most* murder in America has always been an underclass problem - you can overlay murder rates on income data census tract by census track and get nearly a one to one correlation. So the question is both simpler and more complex - which is how do you attack the poverty in US inner cities which is where most US poverty and most US murder are? A big part of the reason we have poor, decayed inner cities is because they are mostly black, and when whites moved away they took their political power and economic development resources with them. That's more or less the definition of institutional racism. Political resources allotment decisions made by majoritarian systems have a natural bias toward beggaring the minority. That's baked into the system. That's a hard political problem to solve. Integration is the 'easiest' answer in a system like ours where representation is geographically based, but America doesn't seem to be capable of it. But to be clear, murder in Chicago and mayhem like Sandy Hook or Oxford are quite different problems and we defeat ourselves when we don't keep the distinction clear. It's true they intersect at the availability of guns, and reduction in that availability would help both, but that is the only factor they share in common.

This is a good counterpoint to my earlier compliant that Campbell expects too much of Goff. It's true Campbell is more understandable in a context where you think that he believes he has build to build a culture where it's understood that execution is both expected and possible before he will ever get that execution.

well, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

it's just another deflection strategy. Understanding the linguistic tics of firearms has close to nothing to do with understanding their social, legal and public health effects. I doubt many traffic safety experts could tell you much about the thermodynamics of an internal combustion engine. For that matter do the self appointed firearms experts know anything about the chemistry of the powder or the phase diagrams of the metallurgy of said weapons, all critical to what they are - is that enough to disqualify them to speak?

Speaking of OSU - I was amused to see a disappointed Buckeye fan on the Columbus SBNation site accuse Ryan Day of DAntonio.ism - i.e. being unwilling to move on from under-performing staff.

transfer portal QBs will become the next competitive advantage. Snag a good one you don't mind living with and then you are free to throw all the 5 start recruits at him you can land. If one can't beat him out, fine, they can walk. If one does, even better. When he's out of eligibility go out and find another Soph xfer to set up the process again.

For the Vikes this was like the Ravens game was for the Lions. The idea this Lions offense would go 75 in 1:50 with no time outs was probably as hard to take seriously as the chance of someone hitting a 66yd FG.

The advantage Oliva probably has over Allen with voters is that he played on some good teams in MInn when he was productive. Allen's teams in Philly and Chicago were crappy. Maybe that shouldn't matter but I think there are almost subliminal ideas that are always there in the background for some voters that a good player should elevate his team and likewise that on a good team a good player is seeing the opposition's best in a way that a player on a bad team may not. Sure a player can never go the WS/playoffs and make the Hall, but I think it's always a slightly higher bar for them. Allen was on one Phillies playoff team at the end but he was not a big contributor by then and didn't do much in that playoff

we saw both good and terrible Goff in multiple turns in the course of one game today, so who knows how much who is calling the plays has to do with whatever make him tick or lose time.

If you want some fun around this in literary form: "Labyrinths" a collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was probably more read by other writers than the public. Umberto Eco named his antagonist librarian in "The Name of the Rose" after Borges.

LOL - do you want me to recap the last 10,000 posts from this and the old forum? Rejection of science, cultural celebration of ignorance , the shift from the popularity of rational/enlightenment Christianity (old school Protestantism) to anti-scientific biblical fundamentalism (this is a huge movement - by far the most important), movement away from demanding critical thinking from the leadership on both the right and left, the increasing cultural objectification of women even in the ironic face of the explicit rhetoric against it, the re-emergence of the US white nationalism, the explicit admission by the political elites that democratic principles are now strictly transactional ( this one is significant because even when principles were ignored in the past, they were not admitted to be ignored, so social pressure could be brought bear to bring things back toward compliance. When the elites are explicit in their rejection of principle, that leverage now lost - you will never shame Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump, to live up to a higher principle than the win - and yes I could probably come with someone on the other side just as bad but not as close to mind if I wanted to spend more time than I do.). That's all I got in 5 min.....

I remember Oliva as a really high profile player in his day, so at least from the 'fame' part I have no complaint. It's tough to look back at the guys from the pitcher era and decide who 'deserves' it given the statistical compression between the good and great players of that era. But he didn't play long enough to do anything on the counting stat end so I don't know by what logic he goes in and Freehan is still out.

LOL. For a Buckeye, KH has been OK in my book over the years. He did get way out in front of his skis on the Les Miles thing. He did an interview later where he admitted that as an analyst he needed to stay out of the news end. I think someone he thought he could trust used him there. Needs to start watching his weight though - looking a little portly in his last commercial!

well, that was my quick paraphrase so don't dump on KH for that.