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Of course Republicans roundly criticize Democrats for that. i would expect nothing less.

I promise you that, if the **** ever does come down for him in some beautiful world, he will claim someone else posted his “truths” and that he had no knowledge of it, and he will expect that argument will stick. Not for nothing, I also predict that if he ever goes to trial for his dismantling of America’s greatness, he will show up with newly grayed hair and either using a walker or sitting in a wheelchair.

Exactly what I mean.

I’m always envious of grocery stores I go to in just about every other city. It doesn’t matter where I go—Michigan, Wisconsin, Alabama, Idaho, you name it—they are always bigger, brighter, cleaner, better-stocked, and more orderly than ours in the city are. They’re cramped like 1980s, and they’re generally dirty, like dirt caked onto the floor kind of thing, with routinely under-stocked shelves with big holes where products are supposed to be. Even when I go in the afternoon, there are still palates in aisles waiting to be unloaded, with no one around in sight. And it’s not just Krogeriano’s, which is bad enough … it’s Jewel, it’s Aldi, it’s Pete’s, it’s Fresh Market, it’s Cermak, it’s all of them. I love this city I’m in, but the grocery store vibe here is one real downside to it.

TBF, it’s hard to exactly nail the dialogue of a whole other bygone era when you don’t live during the era. TB even more F, you don’t have to nail it exactly—you have only to make it seem to the modern audience that you have.

Unmentioned in the Times story but mentioned on CNN: the price index rose 0.6% for this month alone, the equivalent of 7% or so annual inflation.

A distinction without a difference.

You're describing real things, and I don't want to minimize any of it. The incidents in Chicago, the university harassment, the attacks on Jewish students, the Johnson administration's handling of that human rights report. All of that is documented, troubling, and worth calling out forcefully. But here's where I'd draw the line: what you're describing is a surge in antisemitic behavior in urban areas, much of it traceable to radicalized fringe actors, online agitators, and a specific political moment inflamed by the Gaza war. That's real. What I would resist is the leap from that to "the left"—let alone the Democratic Party—having embraced antisemitism as a core value. Johnson's handling of that report was cowardly and shameful. But a cowardly and shameful response as a concession borne of political calculation isn't the same as core ideological antisemitism, and it's definitely not representative of Democratic governance writ large. The far left has absolutely provided cover for some of this, and that's a legitimate indictment of a certain strain of activist politics. But the far left isn't the Democratic Party, and recognizing the asymmetry that exists matters, because the Republican Party has largely been taken over by its radical wing, to the point where figures who would have been considered fringe a decade ago now set the governing agenda. That's not at all true of the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the party's mainstream leadership have been meaningfully critical of campus antisemitism and pro-Hamas rhetoric. The Democratic Party hasn't been captured by its loudest voices the way the GOP has, and pretending the two situations are equivalent in the interest of both-sidism actually lets the bad actors on the left off the hook by miscasting all this as mainstream partisan symmetry, rather than specific aberrant behavior that demands to be condemned. So, yes to everything you're citing as real. No to the implication that Democrats own antisemitism as a value.

I'd feel a lot better about this were the country not so exquisitely gerrymandered.

Correct—I don’t. And you don’t.

And yet I’d bet money the vast majority of MAGA veterans will either give him a pass on it, or fully embrace this as a respectful gesture of support. Or am I wrong, @Tigeraholic1?

You’re close—more like, they’ll explain it to you like they’re a four-year-old.

This makes it look like the mechanic in color is the Republican and Rickets in black and white is the Democrat. Either way, whoever wins will caucus with the Republicans anyway.

I honestly don’t know what you’re referring to when you say this. I might be a bit ignorant of the details you’re aware of.

Theoretically, I’m not opposed to the idea of moving the mound back measurably, like a couple of feet or so, to provide extra time for the batter to react to the balls, although there would be a bunch of consequences to reckon with. One of the big consequences would occur when a pitcher moves up from a 60’ 6” league to a 62’ or 63’ league. Besides the extra strain that gets put on a pitcher’s arm as they try to make up the difference without losing their velocity (because pitchers are human and they’re going inherently to want to preserve that as is), they would also have to rework their entire repertoire of pitches to go 62’ or 63’ instead of 60’ 6”, and there are going to be casualties along the way, both in health and career terms. Also, that would mean all the minor league teams would have to move their mounds back, as well all the independent pro teams that feed players into the systems, and probably all the college teams as well. Elite high school teams in California and the south, which feed pitchers into organized ball, would feel pressured to move their mounds back, too, which might force entire state high school athletic associations to mandate the move, which would cost taxpayer money. And if the Asian leagues don’t comply as well, that would reduce the amount of pitchers that could step right into a rotation or bullpen and contribute to a big league team. So all the mounds in Japan all the way down to the high school level (and HS ball is HUGE in Japan) might well have to make that move. There are probably other consequences as well, but that’s one big one that occurs to me.

The idea would be to discourage the spin race by making it practically impossible to spin the ball as we see now. I might even say that spin rates have gotten so high that there must be pitchers who are overtly trying to break the record for highest-spin rate, just for the recognition.

If being critical of Israel, and not co-signing onto the resolution flatly equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, is itself anti-Semitic, then the Republican campaign to set the bar at "you can be either pro-Israel or anti-Semitic, choose one" has been wildly successful.

That might be countered by fewer pitches per at bat, which I believe is a worthy goal.

Then how about changing the ball to limit spin? Lowering the seams would probably do that. They could also consider changing the surface of the ball from leather to some synthetic, and maybe even include microtexturing to the ball, to produce more symmetric boundary-layer separation that suppresses seam-shifted wake effects. Maybe another way to skin that cat would be to redistribute internal mass outward toward the cover of the ball, to increase rotational inertia without changing total mass. One last way, which is probably the most radical, is increase the size of the ball itself, maybe by a quarter inch and a quarter ounce. But even without that, if you put all three of others together, you could probably reduce max spin by 500 or more RPM, with the effect of reducing strikeout rates, increase balls in play, and tilting the advantage away from flame-throwers and toward command pitchers. If they coupled this set of changes with true robot umpiring on every pitch, which would force pitchers to have to come into the a hitter's zone to get strikes at some point, I bet they could move the K/9 rate from mid-eights to mid-sixes or less overnight. Counterpoint: MLB Marketing and Players would both hate this.

No, "being unhinged" and "knowing what you're doing" are not mutually exclusive by necessity. "Unhinged" typically means acting wildly, unpredictably, or outside social norms, e.g., impulsive rants, bold risks, or chaotic energy. "Knowing what you're doing" implies competence, awareness, and deliberate control over your actions. Trump exhibits both. You're going to focus on the "competence" part. Trump is not anything like competent when it comes to managing the economy, for example. A president absolutely should be competent when it comes to managing the economy. On that, we can agree. The breakdown occurs when we contemplate the difference between "should be" and "is". I would counter that managing the economy is not even his goal. Trump does not care about the economy. He cares about his own aggrandizement, control of others, and personal enrichment. He is very competent when it comes achieving those goals, and the economy is merely a tool in the service of those goals. This line of logic may enrage you. Certainly defensible. I don't like it, either. But just because he is incompetent in something that is traditionally important for presidents but that he cares hardly a whit about, it does not follow that he must by definition be incompetent in everything else, and in every way imaginable. Trump is unhinged. Trump also knows exactly what he is doing. It's simply bad luck that that which he knows exactly what he's doing is in an area that doesn't help the American people, or the rest of the world.

That would be nice, but the presidential electoral setup all but forbids this from happening. Setting aside structural barriers such as ballot access restrictions, the U.S. uses a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post election system, where once a presidential candidate beats all their opponents by at least a single vote within a state, they are awarded 100% of all the votes in that state that ultimately matter. This discourages voters who might otherwise be inclined to vote for a third party from doing so because of the concept of wasting the vote on someone who's destined to lose (something that also happens, BTW, when your major party presidential candidate loses your state anyway.) There's also the general tendency of countries that have single-member districts, instead of proportional representation, to emerge as two-party countries. Both the US and UK are emblematic of that. If we truly want more than two strong parties, we would probably need to move from a winner-take-all system to a proportional representation system, at minimum. Almost none of us here will ever live to see that happen.

That said, this would be a challenge because strikeouts for pitchers are as important to them (not to mention as marketable to the business) as home runs are for hitters. It's all about burnishing the personal brand. You don't get featured on Quick Pitch for inducing ground balls to second for an out.

If you believe in the Better Angels societal evolutionary and/or the Arc of the Moral Universe theories, it should happen eventually, because as long as there is an active, collective effort to do so, we will get there. The only way that can be reversed is to exterminate the intelligentsia and their educated acolytes, outlaw free education altogether, and remake society into a replication of the serfdom era.

I think one day it will be, but a lot of terrible ****, and then defeat and truth and reconciliation, is going to have to happen first, because we are nowhere near the level of peak fascism the country has to experience to finally wake the **** up. You and I won't live to see that entire cycle, probably, but if I were a bettor, I would bet that sometime in the next 25 to 75 years, the outlawing of gerrymandering will happen.