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Anyone in particular on your wish list?

That’s fine. Three years is too long for some people to give him. Get him out of there, next man up. We’re gonna die soon so come on hop to it already. I get it. I’m willing to give him more time to let the plan unspool.

I don't think it's that simple, but it's a reasonable take if you think it is. As for the bat: we might already have the bats in house. yeah, I know prospects fail all the time yada yada, but since the guy got us to the LDS two years in a row by surprise, I am giving Harris all the latitude that has earned him to continue to bring his plan to fruition. And if the plan calls for leaning on the talent we have in house, plus strategic pickups from the market, to get us back into the playoffs and hopefully to the next level in 2026, then I'm on board. If it utterly fails and we miss the playoffs this year in such a way that it's obvious it's due to his inertia, then I will join in the chorus of boos.

That would be only in the third tier of Wexner's crimes.

Not for nothing, someone becoming a pillar of the community makes it exponentially more difficult to go after that person for their crimes, even those crimes with obvious evidentiary trails.

It went beyond mere questioning why years ago. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/why-do-american-white-evangelicals-support-putin/13846702 While many white evangelical leaders oppose Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, televangelist Pat Robertson recently said Putin was “compelled by God” to invade the country in order to precipitate the coming apocalypse. In 2015, Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham, leader of post-war American evangelicalism) visited Putin and Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in Moscow and told the Russian press that “millions of Americans would like [Putin] to come and run for president of the United States”. Though Putin had just invaded Crimea, in 2014 Graham nonetheless applauded his efforts to protect children from “homosexual propaganda”; Graham moreover held that the importance of protecting Christianity was sufficient “justification” for Putin’s decision to strafe Syrian cities by way of support for Bashar al-Assad’s bloody civil war.

I get why you're dismissive of the analogy, but people who can't see what you term to be objective physical evidence of dark matter can reasonably doubt or even reject its existence entirely, particularly if all they have to go on is your word for it—not at all unlike your view of the existence of god.

I am frankly surprised no one has started one of these yet. I myself am less interested in the horse race aspect of it, although this would be a good thread to put all the poll updates we're going to be inundated with. I will lead with this one table I see, indicating how competitive districts are considered to be by the Cook Political Report. This table is not an indication of how the 2026 election is specifically likely to go based on polling, but rather, how Cook rates the basic competitiveness of the districts based on their description below. https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings About CPR House Race Ratings The CPR House Race Ratings assess the competitiveness of all 435 House elections. Competitiveness is determined by several factors, including the district's political makeup, the candidates' strengths and weaknesses, the political environment in the state and nationally, and interviews with candidates and campaign professionals. When sourcing the CPR Race Ratings, please refer to our terms of use. To inquire about API access and licensing, please submit a request.

I can’t see dark matter but I believe it exists.

Is this a real thing? I hadn’t heard of anything like this.

I think they have set it up to become IP centered around the daughter.

I have always assumed “butt load” is a misnomer for “boatload”.

I have had a wired Kidde with a backup battery for a few years now and I’m pretty happy, although it’s so coincidental this came up just now. A couple weeks ago I’m in my office upstairs and the alarm downstairs just goes off. I am … well … alarmed. I have never had a fire before. So I get downstairs and I see or smell nothing amiss. I go to the app and manage to turn it off. I also have an air quality monitor on all three of my alarms and they all say the AQ is good, even the alarm that’s going off. I chalk it up to a random blip. Then, ten minutes later, it goes off again. I turn it off again. Then five minutes later, there it goes again. AQ is still good. So, finally, I disconnect it. I call Kidde tech support. The lady on the phone is really good. She confirms that the unit is simply failing, annd she arranges for a replacement to be sent right away. Super responsive. I’m very happy. I get the new alarm on Xmas Eve, and it looks very different from the alarm I have. I figure, it must be a new model. But then I connect it, pair it to the app, it’s working as intended—but there’s no air quality reading for it. So, Kidde sent a downgraded product to replace the one that went bad under warranty. This can’t be right. I have reached out to them a couple times and not gotten a response. Maybe they are slower during the holidays. But I definitely need a replacement with an air quality monitor because if it wasn’t for that—if I hadn’t seen the air quality was good was the other two working units—I wouldn’t have known right away there wasn’t a fire raging.

Maid Of 'Onor?

They could not implement the 90% floor in a vacuum. They would have to also implement significant, almost close to total revenue share among the teams as well. The owners might be all hedge funds and billionaires who can “afford it”, but even so, it would be unreasonable to force their entity to operate at a loss by enforcing a 90% floor in place where the market can’t support it. On the other hand … It could be fairly conjectured that by forcing all teams to spend to 90% of a cap, that would result in their getting better players they would not have paid for before, which would result in more interest, which would result in bigger crowds and greater local and regional marketing partnership interest, which would result in more revenue that would support the Pirates and Rays of the world. So, maybe it’s not as clean as all that after all. The only thing I know for certain is that inertia in the face of proposed change is always the easiest path.

100% Tarik Skubal ain’t going anywhere in 2026, and 50% he ain’t going anywhere after that.

That works for some hitters, mainly line drive hitters. It could also work situationally, such as grounders to second base to get a runner from third home.

This might be a little closer to how I fell about all of it. It’s hard for me to get my arms around the idea that none of this was designed in some way, if even haphazardly. Maybe that’s only because, like most people, I am subconsciously uncomfortable with the idea of the randomness of chaos being in control of the cosmos. But I’m with you on, like, really, who cares how I feel about al of it? Why do I have to explain to defend it on demand? Christians have tasked themselves with the unceasing objective of converting everyone they ever meet to their religion. Talk abut a thankless task, but, also, mind your own damn business and I'll mind mine. I think you might have been the guy I said this to on the old board: evangelical Christianity was never designed as a live-and-let-live religion. It’s a get-in-your-face religion which, right there, clues me that it’s not about how they comport themselves in the world, but how they impose themselves on the world. It’s about controlling you against your will. That’s a key reason I have no use for it.

Try telling that to the young.

Charlie Lau is dead going on 42 years, so he doesn't qualify as "is". Your statement implies there are organizations currently not on board with "stand up straight" today. That's why I asked.

I can concede only that I acknowledge the evidence I have considered is more suggestive of no deity than yes deity. Beyond that, anyone else is free to be as certain as they like, of course, but I simply believe there is no way to prove there is or is not a deity or deities, let alone which deity is in control. Absent that, any decision I or anyone else might make to believe that there is or is not a deity can be nothing more than an article of faith.

Is there any example of any organization that's not on board with 'stand up straight'?

Disagree. Anyone who can turn policy on its head 180 degrees by musing thoughtlessly can screw up the country arguably worse than someone who has to put any time into it.

I'm not agnostic because I am afraid to admit I am atheist because I fear family or peer pressure, or fear violence from Christians around me. Neither my family nor my community swing that way. I am agnostic because I think it's literally impossible to know with certainty what the deity situation is. I can't bring myself to consider myself atheist because, to me, that requires the same conceit of certainty that evangelical Christianity entails. Speaking just from my experience on the ground (and explicitly excluding this forum), both evangelicals and atheists have always been glad to tell me exactly what they believe (and what I should believe) with identical energy and sense of purpose, and each side makes me uncomfortable with their self-professed certainty and ardor. There's only one possible way we can discover the truth, and once we do, we won't be able to come back and tell anyone what that truth is. I acknowledge that certain beliefs are probably closer to the truth than others, and that the evidence we have at hand to date seems to suggest lack of deity, but again, I'm loathe to profess any certainty about any of it. I just don't think either atheists or religionists can know for a fact who or what god/gods is/are or isn't/aren't with any certainty, and I'm suspicious of anyone who professes that certainty in any event. But more importantly, to me anyway, I don't feel I am required to pick a side either way and defend it with either my heart or my life. At least not yet.

Or those who say they are Christians because it makes them look cool and tough, but don't give a **** about or may not even be aware of any of the messages of love and empathy Jesus professes, which seems obvious to me when you read stuff like this: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-empathy-a-sin-some-conservative-christians-argue-it-can-be