chasfh

I agree that McGonigle will start the season in Toledo unless he proves he is bulletproof on a process basis, and chances are he won't. I don't think this will be a cynical case of manipulating his earning power to save a few bucks, but it sure will be positioned that way, here and elsewhere. I also agree that McKinstry deserves a chance to show he can repeat, unless his mechanics completely break down in March. I mean, I would bet real money he won't repeat it, but he has certainly earned that opportunity to prove it coming into the season.

I have really ramped up my usage of LLAMAs just in the past few weeks, because it finally dawned on me when it makes sense to use search like Google versus a LLAMA like ChatGPT: Use Google when you need to know simple facts like who, what, where, when. Use ChatGPT when you need deeper explanations along the lines of why or how or does. Still, always check against original sources before you act on its advice on important matters. I’m now moving on to comparing the various LLAMAs versus one another, so I rigged one of my laptop browsers to always open to six main LLAMAs: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, and Meta AI. My plan is to occasionally run the same queries along different subject lines on all of them to see which ones provide the best answers and whether different LLAMAs are better than they others depending on subject matter. I will probably end up paring it does to a couple, but out of the gate, it looks like ChatGPT is the leader on breadth of “knowledge” and ability to filter results in an understandable way, and you can specify limits to its output within the query to defeat digital logorrhea.

Atheism and agnosticism may not be in the same certainty-of-belief bucket, but are they all that different as they relate to established religions, which involve choice of deity?

I have a sneaking suspicion that a high percentage of people who self-identify as "Christian" (or, as many might say it, "Chryis-tchyian") aren't really on speaking or praying terms with any deity. People like that seem to just use "Jesus Christ" as either a trump card or a punchline.

This is from Axios this past Friday. You wouldn't know this is happening because of the hyper-christian posturing of the MAGA elite and their red hat followers and the way they are using state resources to respect one particular establishment of religion. However, I don't think this is surprising given how bad a name those people are given Christianity with their wrong-headed, muscle-bound, indiscriminate prosecution of the least of our brothers. 1 big thing: America's great unchurching The U.S. is undergoing its fastest religious shift in modern history, marked by a rapid increase in the religiously unaffiliated and numerous church closures nationwide, Axios' Russell Contreras writes. Why it matters: The great unchurching of America comes as identity and reality are increasingly shaped by non-institutional spiritual sources — YouTube mystics, TikTok tarot, digital skeptics, folk saints and AI-generated prayer bots. It's a tectonic transformation that has profound implications for race, civic identity, political persuasion and the ability to govern a fracturing moral landscape. 🧮 By the numbers: Nearly three in 10 American adults identify as religiously unaffiliated — a 33% jump since 2013, according to the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). That's quicker than almost any major religious shift in modern U.S. history, and it's happening across racial groups. About four in ten Americans ages 18 to 29 identify as religiously unaffiliated (38%), an increase from 32% in 2013, PRRI said. Gallup polling finds 57% of Americans seldom or never attend religious services, a jump from 40% in 2000. Zoom in: The shift in religious activity is leaving behind a trail of "church graveyards," or empty buildings that are now difficult to sell or have been abandoned. An unprecedented 15,000 churches are expected to shut their doors this year, far more than the few thousand expected to open, according to denominational reports and church consultants. These churches once served as community gathering places for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, voting precincts, or town halls, leaving a void. Megachurches show signs of stability, but not enough to reverse overall declines. 🙏 The intrigue: As Americans unchurch, YouTube channels like Spiritual Manifestation attract hundreds of thousands of subscribers who share mysticism, spiritual insight, and "inner wisdom" content online. YouTube videos of speeches by the late agnostic and astronomer Carl Sagan and atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins attacking religion have drawn millions of views. Devotees to unofficial Catholic Latino folk saints such as Santa Muerte and Jesús Malverde have also become increasingly prominent outside official religion. Share this story.

I don't see anything?

So, does Trump spending so much time and energy redecorating the White House into a Third World Dictator Gold Leaf motif utterly charm and delight the red hats? If nothing else, it's certainly easy for them to understand.

They do have a history of "coloreds", so, close enough.

I love when people interpret "might" as being the same as "absolutely, unequivocally, definitely 100% will". 😉

It looks like he's got a pretty good eye, though.

That's true to the degree you have to go outside to make it happen. Some lucky teams have a bunch of great young cost-controlled All-Star level players coming up through the system all at the same time, like the Tiger teams of the early to mid-80s. That might also be us in a couple or three years!

OK, so nothing he’s doing or nothing he or anybody has said. That’s fair.

The way it looks to me, the nature of the battlefield really has changed, hasn’t it? For millennia it literally didn’t matter how smart a guy was—you just sent him forward with the line as part of a brute force attack and they were mere chum, so it almost didn’t matter whether he got mowed down or how many went down with him. But by the time Vietnam came around, operations were far more complex and multi-faceted, which required a minimum level of intellectual capacity not needed during the Crusades (which used children!), for instance, and could lead to the failures you describe. Today, of course, there is no real battlefield as in the type imagined during the Charge of the Light Brigade. If there that kind of hand-to-hand engagement anymore, it’s more street to street, building to building, trench to trench, hill to hill, tree to tree, etc, which also requires a higher minimum of intellectual capacity to execute properly than chivalrous open field combat. Am I close?

Hope you’re right!

The shine, to the degree it was there in the first place, has been coming off Parker for me over the last year. He seems to be hurt all the time and he was again last year, and when he came back, he hit like a first-time rookie rushed up to the bigs. I know he’s only 26, but as you imply, most really good players are a finished product by that age, and Parker has a boatload of blue on his Savant card, a bad sign for his future. At this point I think the best case scenario is we’re marking time with him until Max is ready; at worst, we’re going to have to replace him during the season if he’s losing more games with his bat than he wins with his glove, which is solidly within the range of outcomes.

I suspect Hinch, like any other manager, would rather have eight All-Stars who are locked into their positions than a roster of pretty good guys who can play anywhere. He’s dealing with the limitations of the roster given to him, just as Harris is dealing with the realities of the marketplace to assemble that roster. If we had Dodgers money and Dodgers cachet, we would have Dodgers rosters and Dodgers rings.

No one is sure that anyone will. The only practical known is that the 26-man roster we see on the page today is not the 26-man roster we break camp with. Here in December, though, all the possibilities are still on the table.

What leads you to believe Colt has a uniquely high risk of becoming either fat or muscle-bound?

Not necessarily, but quite possibly. McGonigle and/or Hao-Yu Lee could make the team out of camp.

Right around the time they conscript the over-65s, the under-16s, and the intellectually disabled.

Assuming no roster changes, I think we would also see Vierling and McStinky at third. There will be roster changes, though.

I am functioning Asperger’s who jumps a mile high at sharp loud noises made in an unexpected and unpredictable manner, so I would be completely useless in an infantry. Well, that plus I’m 64 with advanced scoliosis. I’ll keep delivering boxes to food-insecure people of modest means for a Latino-based pantry facing down a federal government trying shut it down instead. That’s my war.