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Perhaps Putin bought them on layaway during the 2016 campaign.

I haven’t felt this concerned about the possibility of someone lobbing a nuke at us since the early 1980s. Shit’s getting more real by the day.

An interesting hypothesis might be that China might be egging on Russia in order to see the mistakes they make and that China needs to avoid when they take on Taiwan.

Apropos of nothing, a better analogy would be “this is Youngkin asking guys from Virginia to go to war with West Virginia when the guys in WV are shooting back.”

They’ve got to be begging and pleading with Trump to condemn it at least publicly. There’s an election to win in November and that can’t brook the kind of chaos an unclear Trump could wreak on the base’s margins.

A lot of Americans in 1938 supported the Nazis over the rest of Europe and considered communism a greater threat than fascism. There were many high profile leaders of this thinking and massive Nazi rallies taking place in, of all places, Madison Square Garden, even daring to put portraits of George Washington on the same stage as Nazi brown shirts brandishing swastikas. If it's 1938 in America, then God help us all.

No need for apologies, I was simply building on your comment.

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.