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Charming.

I’m not sure how much we should take the word of a considered work of fiction, although I would agree that special forces are likely to be trained in that kind of fake accent subterfuge. I could see that being applied to the situation mtutiger brought up, the Russians who were undercover as Ukrainian police at the checkpoint. I tend to believe that’s a minute percentage of the total armed force. The subsequent post suggesting Russian army regulars might be stealing clothes from houses to go undercover and cause mayhem among the civilians got me thinking about whether the average Russian could pull off a local Ukrainian accent without any special training. Unless they’ve all been special-trained in faking accents as part of their regular training the past few years. That’s possible, I suppose.

Ray of hope?

Today was a little easier. Wordle 252 3/6 ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ 🟩⬜🟩⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I’m not cool enough to do Quordle, Flurdle, Blurdle, or any of those other variants. Five minutes a morning is plenty enough for my wife and me to bond over one quick fun puzzle.

If there is a present-day Lieutenant Colonel Petrov work somewhere in the bowels of Russia now, we may need him to step up sooner than later.

This is the kind of thing I was alluding to in my post speculating what might happen next if ground invasion starts faltering, or gets too bogged down.

I wonder how easy or difficult is it for a Russian to mimic a Ukrainian accent? Russia is a big country and I would guess there’s a wide variation of accents, particularly influenced by decades of influx of comrades from nearby client Soviet states which have their own languages. That would surely influence the way they speak Russian. Assuming Russian soldiers come from all over Russia, how likely is it that an undercover Russian soldier can consistently fool all the Ukrainians around him with his attempt at a local accent? I myself can tell someone is Canadian by the way they speak, pretty much thanks to growing up with channel 9, but even so, I probably couldn’t effectively fake a Canadian accent to literally save my life. And this doesn’t even contemplate local accent variations within Ukraine itself. If a young male somebody I’ve never seen before shows up in my neighborhood speaking Ukrainian with a weird accent that kind of sounds like it comes from another part of the country, wouldn’t that be suspicious?

Won't somebody at Baseball please think of anyone else but the gamblers?

Getting rid of the leagues entirely, even if they renamed them after Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, might be a third rail issue. Or maybe not. Maybe the only fans who care about that are old and dying off. The casual fans probably don't care either way, and the gamblers definitely give no shits.

I'm old enough to remember getting hammered for even asking this as a question, but I'm still not convinced that Manchin and Sinema are rubber-stamping this. I could see them at least using their vote here as leverage to water down or kill Democratic legislation their Republican constituents (and colleagues 😏) don't like.

TBF, they may simply be telling CNN as an organization to go fuck themselves, so Joe Lockhart perhaps need not take it seriously.

I've not used any pejoratives in relation to socialism, so I'm not clear whether you're trying to put something across here about some people. In any event, I'm not making up the concept about American sports engaging in behaviors widely regarded as socialist. It's been broached many times before. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/why-american-sports-are-socialist/487640/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stratfor/2017/04/18/sports-americas-well-kept-socialist-secret/?sh=cf07ebb7cb04 https://www.dw.com/en/sports-life-are-us-sports-really-socialist-compared-to-the-capitalism-of-european-football/av-54984193 Capitalist country, socialist sport - Sports Business Journal And, because I like you so well, one that supports your point: https://businessethicshighlights.com/2015/11/24/are-american-sports-leagues-socialist/ Bonus: here are some flip side articles talking about soccer as a free market capitalism sport: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/ironically-european-soccer-is-more-capitalist-than-american-sports https://bleacherreport.com/articles/153183-the-last-bastion-of-free-market-capitalism-european-soccer Happy reading!

And you have very narrow scope of thinking on the topic of socialism, without any apparent flexibility to apply concepts related to it beyond the way macroeconomies operate. I'm willing to agree to disagree at this point.

I know this seems like a naive statement and we're early on things, but I do kind of wonder whether this misadventure will wake up many of the everyday people around the world who are playing footsies with the concept of far-right-wing autocracy? I would think Putin's move into Ukraine and the rising death count would turn off many more noncommittal people from that kind of thinking than attract them to it. Are Tucker, Hannity, et al actually winning any new fans with their pro-invasion cheerleading?

I think the practices American sports leagues implement to ensure a parity both on the field and in the ledger books do smack of socialism.

You may be right. He may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic we're looking for.

This I agree with, and was talking with some friends about it last night. It seems as though, as of today, there is no hope for a full season starting on time, but sometimes all it takes is for one issue to get untracked and solved, then all the remaining dominoes fall quickly, and all of a sudden, within hours, they announce a deal. We've all seen movies like that before.

Great point, this. Neither winning nor losing on the field make any direct contribution to revenues or the bottom line. There is some assumption that a winning team makes more money than a losing team, but the 2005 Chicago Cubs finished 79-83, good for fourth place in the league and drawing almost 3.1 million fans; the next season, 2006, they landed in last place with a 66-96 record, and their attendance went up over 3.1 million. Winning and losing can contribute to more bottom line success, but not always.

Sounds like you're daring me to enlighten you! Good thing we're not talking in a bar right now! 😉😂 Ah, jk, pal. I don't mean socialism in the classical Marxist sense relative to the divisive Marxist language you used, obviously. But there are numerous socialist tendencies in the way Baseball, and all professional sports to similar degrees, are run: revenue redistribution from rich to poor teams; competitive aid for losing teams such as drafts and free agent compensation; strict controls governing the acquisition of playing talent; teams not allowed to fail out of the league through incompetence or mismanagement; and, of course, league-wide controls in place intended to prevent the best teams from breaking away from a desired competitive balance. Plus in Baseball, they are legally allowed to pick which owners can even participate in the league, and can bar others from starting their own teams to come in and compete with established teams, or at least earning the right to come in and participate through good performance. Contrast this with European soccer, which is a truly free market enterprise: teams have free reign to spend as much as they want to acquire talent; teams earn promotion to and relegation from top leagues based strictly on on-pitch performance; no market size-based revenue sharing to ensure any kind of competitive balance on the pitch or among the boardrooms; and if a team is incompetent or terrible, they are simply allowed to fold their business, or "wind up" as they like to say in Jolly Old. I do not prefer the European soccer model, necessarily, but American sports leagues are far more socialist in practice, and the things that you advocate to strictly limit the ability of teams to break away from the pack, in the service of protecting bad and incompetent teams' position on the field and within the league itself, are part and parcel of that.

I was thinking more Russian lives lost in the invasion, although I suppose that could comport with your comment as well.

I guess "intrigued" is the best I ever felt about it as well, but I knew I was never going to like it because not only do I enjoy the mystique of separate leagues, I also prefer as much competitive balance as possible. I actually did not mind 1996 at all, just after both 14-team leagues broke into three divisions and before interleague play. Even though the divisions had an unequal number of teams (5-5-4), teams would play 13 games against their own division, and either 12 or 13 against the remaining nine or ten teams. It was the last gasp of the balanced schedule.

I don't know, would they? I was thinking only about the apparent goal, not the details about how to get there.

A quick glance at b-ref suggests that leagues had a similar divisional schedule setup.

Yeah, I figured you'd have no real answer to that. 😉