1. Most of you are familiar, at least qualitatively, with the concept of viscosity. Things that are thick and gummy, like motor oil or molasses, have a high viscosity. Things that are not, like gases, have a low viscosity. For most fluids, the quantitative measure of viscosity is relatively constant. But some fluids have a viscosity that changes depending on whether they are still or flowing. Oobleck is a great example – the cornstarch water mixture gets much more viscous as you apply a force to get it to move. This is called a shear-thickening fluid.
That allows you to do cool stuff like put oobleck on a speaker cone and re-create the aesthetic qualities of a Tool video.
Alternatively, you can take advantage of shear thickening to make like Jesus.
Some folks are trying to use shear thickening fluids to create flexible body armor that stiffens when a bullet flies into it.
2. NIST unveils is brand new reference cigarette.
3. I think they’ve been thorough to the point of uselessness in the latest grad school rankings.
The problem, put simply, is that the National Research Council (NRC) committee that carried out the 6-year study has been so careful about not imposing its own views on the community that its findings are hard to interpret. Instead of assigning a single score to each program in a particular field, the assessment ranks programs on five different scales.
Each score is given as a range of rankings using the 5th and 95th percentiles as endpoints. The panel also went to great lengths to avoid the criticism lodged against the previous NRC assessment, published in 1995, which relied heavily on reputational rankings from faculty members in each field. This time around, the committee chose 20 characteristics—including research activity, student support and outcomes, and diversity—to measure the quality of any graduate program, and then conducted two separate faculty surveys to figure out what weight to give each characteristic.
4. We have a new director of the National Science Foundation.
5. UCSC discovers new planet, could be habitable; ptbnl bait. I can think only of this:
From an MLB.com PR email (a list I asked to be removed from, oh, a million times)
Dallas will be great. I’m less confident in Chavez.
Glenn Oobleck also gets much more
viscousvicious as you apply a force to get it to moveYeah, this is pretty black and white shit.
Obama is an A+ domestically, but at best a D on this stuff.
So you don’t misunderstand: I do not disagree with you in principle. Also, I believe the constant invocation of “state secrets” is pernicious. That said, here is a premise and some questions:
Let’s say monkeyball, in a fit of roid rage and angst over the fact that Obama turned out to be the worst, most un-liberal pussified naive CIA loving president ever, turns his back on his family, Free Kraut, and his nice comfy life by the bay, hops the next flight to Yemen, and joins al-Qaeda. He grows a beard, dyes his hair, plots all manner of dastardly deeds, networks with his new terrorist pals in Afghanistan and Pakistan, plants a few bombs here and there, etc.
1. Are all drone strikes/targeted killings in Pakistan/Somalia/Yemen problematic, or just the ones that might hit monkeyball?
2. If monkeyball is killed by American soldiers while on a Taliban meet & greet junket in Afghanistan, is this legally/ethically different than the scenario described in #1?
3. How do you deal with monkeyball? Do you say “because monkeyball is conceivably in their midst, we will not use lethal force, ever”? Do you say “we will use lethal force, except when we know monkeyball is around”? Do you say “we will not target monkeyball specifically, his name will not appear on any list, but if he happens to die in the course of us killing terrorists, so be it”?
My answers: 1) the former; 2) legally maybe, ethically no; 3) I have no idea, but it is a genuinely difficult question.
***
The “American citizens OMG” part of this is a red herring. The problems are
a) The drone strikes/targeted killings, full stop. This is an immoral, opaque clusterfuck masquerading as a “success story”.
b) The no-good-answers question of how you deal with an American who leaves the country and joins up with the bad guys (especially given the context of our ongoing (declared and undeclared) wars against said bad guys).
As a non-citizen, I heartily endorse this. And not just wrt lethal force.
Nope. If MB is in an enemy combatant’s base and is killed by a bombing, that’s war. I have zero problem (other than underlying problems with the war in the first place).
Let’s make it a WWII analogy so the moral issues about fighting in the first place go away.
My view:
If a U.S. citizen heeds the Nazi call to those of German heritage and fights for the Nazis (which certainly happened), I have no trouble with US troops killing him as part of normal wartime operations.
I do, however, have a problem with FDR saying “US Citizen Joe Schmidt is a Nazi, so I will send teams of assassins to scour the world and murder him”
I do not have a problem with FDR saying “US Citizen Joe Schmidt is a Nazi, so I will send teams of spies to scour the world and arrest him”
To answer your questions:
1. MB’s presence does not effect the morality of drone strikes on military targets.
2. No
3. By fighting your war but not individually targeting him for death which is basically your last option.
As to your other points:
A. To the extent we are waging war we have a right to actually wage it. In a war where the enemy attempts to blend in / shield themselves with civilians, it is unclear how else you could possibly fight. It seems to me that the only way to win this sort of war is balls-to-the-wall with an acceptance that there will be civilian casualties. This, of course, suggests that starting the war in the first place might be a bad idea.
B. I don’t think its a particularly difficult question at all.
Except that the point of this claim by the administration – the right to kill American citizens – is to make the missile strikes legally acceptable in a world where it’s conceivable that Americans are mixed in with terrorist targets. Without the missile strikes, they don’t make this claim, and if you are on board with the missile strikes, you are, in effect, on board with the killings, as it is not logistically feasible to “check for monkeyball” every time. What you are arguing is that it’s okay to kill Americans so long as they’re not on a list, which seems to me a) semantic, especially since the strikes almost by definition involve “targets”, and therefore “lists”, and b) of a piece with Glenn Greenwald’s fevered imagination, not the reality of the situation.
***
To the extent we are waging war we have a right to actually wage it. In a war where the enemy attempts to blend in / shield themselves with civilians, it is unclear how else you could possibly fight. It seems to me that the only way to win this sort of war is balls-to-the-wall with an acceptance that there will be civilian casualties. This, of course, suggests that starting the war in the first place might be a bad idea.
I’m not entirely sure what this means. Which war? The war in Afghanistan? The war on terror (quote unquote)?
I am talking about the wars we’re not calling wars, in particular in Pakistan, where missiles hit the ground nearly every day. I am saying those strikes are of dubious strategic efficacy, are escalating in intensity largely outside the realm of public debate, have the effect of creating more enemies than they eliminate, kill many innocents, are poorly reported on, have no legal standing, are increasingly pissing off Pakistanis (military, civilian government, and populace), and are unlikely to end anytime soon because there is no logical endpoint.
There’s a difference between “we have found a terrorist training camp at coordinates [whatever], lets bomb it” and “we have found John Smith at coordinates [whatever], lets bomb him”
The latter is a big problem is John Smith is a U.S. citizen, and it’s a separate problem from the “lets bomb it” problem. I don’t think it’s merely semantics, and I don’t think the two problems are necessarily intertwined.
And, fwiw, it’s basically been since WWII that we’ve felt ok fighting wars without declaring them. There is absolutely a war being fought in Pakistan, as well as one being fought in Afghanistan. What I’m saying is that if we’re going to fight them, tactics like drone strikes are ok to the extent that fighting the war at all is ok.
There’s a difference between “we have found a terrorist training camp at coordinates [whatever], lets bomb it†and “we have found John Smith at coordinates [whatever], lets bomb himâ€
There is no practical difference, is what I am saying.
***
And, fwiw, it’s basically been since WWII that we’ve felt ok fighting wars without declaring them. There is absolutely a war being fought in Pakistan, as well as one being fought in Afghanistan. What I’m saying is that if we’re going to fight them, tactics like drone strikes are ok to the extent that fighting the war at all is ok.
I still don’t know what your position is here … do *you* think it’s okay? Or do you think it’s only okay to the extent that it’s okay? (sorry, not able to resist snark; feel free to snark back) And if so, where do you draw the line? Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan … Syria and Lebanon if you lump us in with Israel, as the bad guys surely do … our willingness to pursue said bad guys across the globe with missiles makes the “war on terror” a self-fulfilling prophecy. Set aside the morality/legality of it for a moment: it’s also extremely stupid.
I’m sure I’ve quoted this before, but it’s appropriate here as well:
I totally disagree with the first part, to the point that I’m baffled you think that. You really don’t think there’s a difference between, say, bombing a terrorist camp and bombing a citizen we think might be a terrorist while he’s traveling alone somewhere?
On the second part, you’re conflating two issues.
Issue the first is the justification of an underlying military conflict. I suspect you’re resisting my WWII analogy because you’re trying to make the perceived injustice of the Afghanistan war do the work for drone strikes generally. Do you really think it would have been unjustified to launch drone strikes against Normandy defenses if that technology had been available? How about if Nazis had forced some local civilians to live at each site?
Issue the second is killing citizens we suspect of being enemy combatants.
To be clear about my positions:
I think drone strikes are not an inherently bad way of fighting a war, i.e. are totally justifiable if the underlying war is justifiable. Or your “okay to the extent that it’s okay” snark.
I think that fighting wars without declaring them is both (1) disturbing and (2) common.
I think that we should have started any wars since, at latest, Clinton’s various interventions except Afghanistan.
I think that we would have been done in Afghanistan (as defined by military defeat of the Taliban and capture of OBL) much sooner had we had competent political leadership in 2001.
I think that at this point the war in Afghanistan is counterproductive and we should be pulling out.
LOL. I started typing a long righteous rant about your penultimate point, and then I realized you weren’t talking about competent Afghani political leadership.
Thing is, if we had indeed been favored with competent domestic political leadership Jan-Sep 2001, we might not have had any cause to invade Afghanistan in the first place … (or, possibly, we would have, but without the initiating casualties and property destruction).
I unequivocally do not believe that 9/11 was Bush’s fault, and while it (like every other similar act) might appear preventable in hindsight I unequivocally believe that the relevant people were doing everything in their power to stop it.
I disagree quasi-strongly. That is, I don’t think it was “Bush’s fault” per se — everything I’ve read indicates that it was a top-to-bottom institutional/organizational failure to connect the dots.
Now, it seems to me that there are two ways to proceed from that: either utterly fatalistic (nothing but blind luck was going to stop it) or from an org-behav perspective, where the one thing besides blind luck that could have stopped it would have been a top-down insistence on a more aggressive/rigorous/holistic/cross-departmental approach. Which, I think we can all agree, regardless of the likelihood of its working, was Nev. Er. going to happen under the Bush admin. I think that it’s highly likely that such an effort would have happened under a Gore admin, but YMMV.
In every case where anything has ever gone wrong you can determine a way that that thing could have been caught and corrected.
This is why there are such things as plaintiffs lawyers.
I am pleased to note your now-sanguine reaction to Chavez getting 123 PAs.
I’m pleased to note that Homeland Security is a figment of my imagination and/or something Gore would have done pre-9/11
Bush’s post-9/11 state security apparatus being able to travel backwards in time is the only figment of your imagination I see here.
And yes I basically am arguing that Gore would have proactively instituted something along those lines prior to 9/11 (along with, I suspect, similar extra-Constitutional surveillance measures to what Bush pursued after 9/11). And would likely have been impeached over it. Whether he stopped 9/11 or not.
I totally disagree with the first part, to the point that I’m baffled you think that. You really don’t think there’s a difference between, say, bombing a terrorist camp and bombing a citizen we think might be a terrorist while he’s traveling alone somewhere?
I think what is happening here (in our discussion) is good evidence for why overheated extrapolations like “Palin could order Kos killed in 2013” are problematic. Outrage about what this could mean in a doomsday scenario obscures the actual, banal rationale for making the claim.
This is not to say the claim is “correct”, or that I agree with it! It is to say that they are not making it so they can “target American citizens”, they are making it so they can blow up groups of terrorists that might contain American citizens (a scenario you are on board with, unless I am reading you wrong: “fighting your war but not individually targeting him for death”).
In actual practice, there is no “lone American strolling down the road in Waziristan”. There is only “we think this group which might contain some of these people may be in this place at possibly that time”. Sometimes monkeyball will be on that list of possibilities. They want to be able to order the strike if he is. That’s it. If your argument is that they should not be able to do that, fine. If your argument is only that they can’t kill him when they know it’s him and he’s not with any other bad guys, that is a purely academic point.
***
Issue the first is the justification of an underlying military conflict. I suspect you’re resisting my WWII analogy because you’re trying to make the perceived injustice of the Afghanistan war do the work for drone strikes generally.
No – either you are misreading me, or I have explained poorly. Likely the latter.
I have not made any point about the injustice of the Afghanistan war (not on purpose anyway!). What I said (about the drone strikes) was:
those strikes are of dubious strategic efficacy, are escalating in intensity largely outside the realm of public debate, have the effect of creating more enemies than they eliminate, kill many innocents, are poorly reported on, have no legal standing, are increasingly pissing off Pakistanis (military, civilian government, and populace), and are unlikely to end anytime soon because there is no logical endpoint.
One mistake you are making (I submit) is the assertion of “an underlying conflict”. If your contention is that Afghanistan is the underlying conflict for our involvement in Yemen or Somalia, that is simply not correct. If you were Dick Cheney, you would say that the “war on terror” is the underlying conflict, but of course the problem with that is that it means we claim license to fire missiles into any country at any time under the pretense of “there are some terrorists there”.
As for Pakistan, those bombings are simultaneously intertwined with and separate from the Afghan conflict. In other words, there are bad guys going back and forth across the border, and parts of NW Pakistan serve as base camps for our enemies in Afghanistan, but as well, when/if we leave, we will still be bombing the shit out of that area, for the same reason we are bombing the shit out of portions of Yemen (or equipping the Yemeni government to do it for us). At its core, it remains the “war on terror” rationale, not the “war in Afghanistan” rationale.
This is – and here I will approvingly quote John McCain for the first and last time – whack a mole. There is no end.
And that’s before you get to civilian deaths and displacements, the extent to which these sorts of actions encourage rather than diminish terrorism, the absence of debate, etc., etc.
I don’t think you can kill U.S. Citizens except through capital trials unless they are actually battling the United States. If there’s a group of people standing around somewhere, including a citizen, I don’t think we can bomb it. If there’s an assault on a US position, then we can.
How about if I retract Afghanistan and replace with Yemen/Pakistan/etc
It may very well be that killing people at all in those places is stupid (I certainly think so). I do not think that drone strikes are the problem in that case, but rather that anything would cause the same problem.
I complete agree w/whack a mole.
How about these:
Do you really think it would have been unjustified to launch drone strikes against Normandy defenses if that technology had been available? How about if Nazis had forced some local civilians to live at each site?
I hope it doesn’t seem as though I’m being evasive (you know me, I’ll argue anything to the end), but the WWII to war on terror analogy is just too preposterous to indulge.
I gather you want me to say that in certain circumstances, it is acceptable to use lethal force in a country we are not at war with, and further, that civilian casualties in these cases are also acceptable. To which I would say yes, I stipulate that is so. You are arguing against a position I have not taken.
The point I am (doggedly, fruitlessly) trying to make is that the war on terror context does not support these actions, either morally or strategically. That is to say, it is wrong and stupid, but wrong and stupid in this case and most cases, not in every case ever.
In other words, we agree.
Fair enough.
I certainly agree that the war on “terror” is extremely dumb. As is the fact that we ever engaged in countries other than Afghanistan. As is the fact that we are still engaged in Afghanistan.
Wait. This means I get to live in a cave, right? Cool, then.
No moral face to the endless war.
Sully’s response containing high volumes of certified stupid.
Nothing in Sully’s list is treason beyond a reasonable doubt. Basically the guy writes love letters to terrorists. It may (quite likely) be true that he has also committed attacks or something, but it is completely unproven (which is why Sully tries to get the “poisonous religious ideology” to do the work). If I started publicly approving of terrorists I’m sure the FBI would take interest, but equally sure that I wasn’t committing treason.
The justification for every denial of civil liberty ever.
No one is treating anything like a civil case. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with treating terrorists like criminals rather than SUPER SCARY ARCH BADDIES since the latter is their mythology.
This will be cold comfort for Sully when President Palin has him killed on a vacation abroad for his treasonous acts of Trig hysterics
And Greenwald
I firmly agree with:
And, of course, it’s depressing to be out rule-of-law-ed by Kenya.
Finally, Glenn earns countless points with:
The change in the viscosity of motor oil has been one of the quietly amazing innovations us DIY mechanic-types have seen over the years. The old conventional 10w-40 (for example) with which I used to top off the old family Gran Torino station wagon (a frequent need for that POS oil-burner) had a thick viscosity like hair conditioner. The synthetic 0w-20 that our new Toyota van uses pours like caramel-colored milk.
King once again among top internet vote-getters, “This will make denying his entry into the hall all the sweeter,” says evil HoF President.
Fuck you, evil HoF president!
[shakes fist and saber at evil HoF president]
5. My favorite was the press release the DOE put out after we published the BOOMERanG results that demonstrated that the Universe is flat, which said that we had shown that the Earth was flat.
You Columbus-hating bastards.
I didn’t realize you were Catholic.
The things you find in some rich old geezer’s wine cellar. This sounds awesome, and according to the article MLB Network will be showing the game in December.
Aybar swings, gets hit in the junk (almost).
That’s hilarious.
Hmm…Barney’s movie had heart, but “Football in the Groin” had a football in the groin.
which one you voting for?
Barney’s movie would have stopped 9/11.
A vote for Football to the Groin then, means…the terrorists win.
In case you wanted to see Carter’s homer again.
I feel significantly less depressed about Carter now than I did a few weeks ago.
To this non-scout’s eye, he has a very quick swing.
The problem as I see it is that he might be a -10 in LF, and combined with a -10 positional adjustment would require him to be +20 with the bat just to be an average position player. I think +20 can be approximated by .250/.340/.500, at least with half his games in Oakland. Do you think that is a mean, pessimistic, or optimistic forecast? I say optimistic, so in my view his *upside* is approaching average.
It’s OK — He’ll go 28-42-41 HR 2011-13 playing a mix of LF and DH, and then Beane will trade him for 3 AA pitchers.
That is an outcome I would probably be ok with.
Deep thoughts:
plus some nm bait from Slusser
Was just coming to link that, but also:
[Insert deranged rant about Dunn being the dumbest possible idea here]
Losing respect for Slusser every time she suggests something stupid like Dunn or Matsui.
Going after Dunn wouldn’t be my choice, but I don’t think it would be stupid.
He’s not certain to be a better hitter than Cust, can only DH (like Cust), and is certain to be far more expensive.
Nothing is certain. But Dunn has hit somewhat better than Cust on average, and is (surprisingly to me) a year younger. It also looks like he’s less bad in the OF.
Like I said, it wouldn’t be my choice, because the (probable) modest gain in production over Cust for the (certain) extra cost doesn’t look like it would give great bang for the buck. But it would likely improve the team, and so would be better than ownership pocketing that money, or doing something that made the team worse like signing Matsui. So I’m sticking with “not stupid.”
(And as speculation about what the team will do, as opposed to what they should do, it’s considerably less stupid than all the talk about Crawford.)
Yes, but only if the park/league adjustments are quite accurate.
The only reason it looks like that is that he measured positive in 2002 and not bad in 2003. His 09/10 numbers are craptastic.
But you’re pretty much conceding that he’d replace Cust, right — i.e., that he wouldn’t upgrade one of the corner OF spots, which are our spots of glaring need. Given the relative degrees of upgrade on positions of not-glaring need, I’d prefer Beltre to Dunn.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was assuming. You could try to find room for both of them, but there’s also Carter to consider, and the thought of having 2 of those 3 at the outfield corners at the same time is kind of scary.
We could pursue Sabean’s all-DH outfield idea, and bring Stairs back, too.
The other thing is that Dunn’s a lefty, so he wouldn’t even theoretically work in a platoon with Cust (back to Manny).
I don’t think you would want to sign Manny with the intention of sitting him on the bench 3/4 of the time, or even 1/2 the time. Against a LHP Cust might sit, with Carter or Manny at DH, but most of the time you’d still be settling for some putrid defense from your corner outfielders.
In fact, as I think about this, I’m becoming convinced that if we’re serious about getting Carter in the lineup, then this putative other corner outfielder we’re targeting should really be someone who can play RF specifically.
werth
Dunn will be a better hitter than Cust. He will also be more expensive.
And he insists on playing 1B.
Odds that he’s more productive there than Barton (including defense)?
Dunn’s a 30 bat and probably a -10 defensively. I think there’s a good chance that Barton can put up +15\+5 next year. I’d call it 50/50.
Hmm… 40/60.
Then again, the original comparison wasn’t Dunn vs. Barton.
Speaking of 3 true outcomes, I’ll admit to a passing interest in Reynolds. (Although not at the ridiculous price suggested on MLBtraderumors.)
Well if that’s true then signing him would be beyond stupid. We’re not going to do something that would displace our current best player.
I wasn’t suggesting the A’s pursue Dunn. I was pointing out the relevant facts. I think he will out-hit Cust next year… but there’s these other things that are an issue.
I am now prepared to join you on the ManRamBandWagon.
Dunn is a dumb idea for many reasons:
1) He is not willing to DH.
2) He is horrible defensively at 1B and LF. No seriously, he’s abysmal.
3) He will be playing LF for the A’s where he was somewhere in the neighborhood of -30(!) in ’09 and ’10. Consequently he’s been worth between 1 and 2 WAR 3 of the last 5 years. This year, he managed 4 WAR because the Nats were finally smart enough to move him to first and he somehow managed to only be -2 there.
4) He will be on the wrong side of 30 for this next contract. I expect continued defensive decline and perhaps offensive decline if he switches leagues and parks to Oakland.
5) He will cost a significant part of the budget while not representing much of an upgrade over any position.
Also, perhaps this doesn’t mean anything but he just posted his lowest OBP (.354) and BB total since his second full season. Obviously, we can’t establish a trend but players of his ilk are known for early declines and like I said, he’s on the wrong side of 30.
To be fair to Slusser… how many other “Type A” sluggers can you think of?
Crawford, while a favorite pursuit of many, is not synomynous with slugging. Werth is repped by Boras.
This cannot be said enough.
This is why Obama’s first farm bill was a real letdown.
Yikes.
But this
is probably oversimplifying things. I’m no farmer, but I’d guess part of our love affair with corn is the fact that it can be easily grown in climates that are too harsh for a lot of fruits and vegetables.
In a world where all 50 states can produce reasonable quality wine, I think we can diversify away from corn to healthier products.
Soshulist.
I has a sad.
Truth or rumor?
There were attempts to classify ketchup as a vegetable in order to circumvent the rule that vegetable must be contained in school lunches. I read it somewhere and IIRC it referred to the US in the nineties.
’80s. Reagan administration.
So truth, after all. Wow.
Sez straight dope:
Wikipedia suggests that if you are willing to put up with the sugar and the salt, you get a little bit more protein, Vitamin C, and tons more lycopene.
And thus did History thwart the first opportunity for FREE KRAUT!
FREE or reduced price KRAUT
TINSTAAFSL
I was just at Target in Willowbrook, IL and the large bags of Frank’s Kraut were on clearance.
High Cructose Forn Syrup?
Even the syrup is outsourced these days.
It’s a sad world when really good successful policies can be demagogued into extreme disfavor.
TARP was necessary, cheap (maybe even profitable), and well-executed. The fact that everyone hates it anyway is one of the more depressing political developments in the last couple years.
I’m deeply conflicted on this taxpayer receipt idea. (Calculate yours).
On the pro side, I see a more informed populace (especially wrt to the relative cost of pieces of government).
On the con side, I see a huge cost to mail the damn things and a huge opportunity to use them for political messaging (i.e. if you want to cut military spending, lump all arguably military items together to make a bigger number, if you don’t, split it up into a ton of tiny categories and leave the program you do want to cut at the top of the list). There would be a battle over this every year.
Thoughts?
PECOTA not so deadly accurate.
This does not make me want to combat climate change.
That has to have been put out by right-wingers. Nobody who sincerely advocates what’s supposedly being advocated in that video could possibly come up with such a stupid idea.
It would appear that is not the case
I think people have a general blindness for this within their own ideological realm.
I agree to a point, but given the production values a lot of people saw what was being made there, and certainly at least a few of them should have started screaming about it.
Get enough people who think the same way into a room and you’re bound to come out with a crazy or a stupid. They couldn’t be bothered to run this by a focus group?
I think people who write movies like Notting Hill have a general blindness to things that suck.
Isn’t part of this just a different culture/humor style?
I was expecting the video to be much worse after these comments.
The guy who wrote it is Richard Curtis, who has written a lot of very popular movies and television shows. He of anyone ought to know what the general public, especially the British public (Blackadder!) would enjoy. Intead, dreck.
Personally, if I were advocating for a particular cause, I would think very very hard before releasing a video, even if *meant* to be humorous, whose key element involved the combustion of those that don’t support the cause. If you’re going to go down that road, just use a giant panda that assaults people who buy the wrong kind of cheese.
So that’s what Pablo Sandoval does in the off-season.
I guess. I’m just saying that people exploding is a staple of British comedy in a way that isn’t true here.
I’m not saying it’s a great video by any means, just that I expected a lot worse.
The British reaction, from what I gather on the intertubes, hasn’t exactly been warm.
Maybe I’m just wrong.
Or maybe the intertubes magnify outrage.
Or maybe the intertubes magnify outrage.
This is almost certainly true.
The hell it isn’t.
I don’t have a particular bone to pick with Stewart or Colbert, but can’t you imagine Stewart playing a clip of someone saying something equally ridiculous and then mugging at the camera?
Agreed. I’m wondering if there’s some legal reason they have to emphasize that (i.e. they’d need to form a PAC if it was a political rally, but not if it’s comedy).
Keep in mind I know very little about election money laws.
I’m shocked by how close these numbers are:
If on-field performance numbers get adjusted for the environmental conditions in which they’re accomplished, shouldn’t attendance numbers, too?
Happy Binary Date day!
Also, my A’s Pet Calendar for this month of October greets me with Mark Ellis, accompnaied by Jack the Irish Wolfhound.
Also, it is Jimmy Carter’s birthday.
I’m disappointed that none of you degenerates alerted me to 9/02/10 day.
Really? Everybody was talking about on the not-internets (what’s that called…oh, real world, right).
Well, I don’t watch the show and live in a bubble.
Who the hell watches 90210 anymore?
Also,
Also Stone will release their next vertical epic.
1. This I want to see:
uh…that’s the second video of this post.
Yup.
I am obviously not on top of my reading comprehension game today.
The seven summits: solar system edition.
I guess Jews do run TV
Just when I thought the A’s were guaranteed no better than a 16th place finish in MLB, the Tigers go and drop 3 in a row, a doubleheader in Cleveland on Wednesday and the first game of a doubleheader in Baltimore tonight.
The Tigers are the only team that still has a chance to finish over .500; they need to beat the Orioles two out of three to do it. Four teams still have a chance to finish .500: the A’s, Angels, Marlins and Dodgers, each of which would have to sweep its final three games to do it. A five-way tie for 15th is possible but unlikely, but if the Tigers win one or especially none of those last three there’s a fairly decent likelihood of a tie for 15th.
So we need to lose one more?
Finally a goal this team can reach.
Detroit could still finish 80-82 if they get swept by the Orioles. To clinch a spot below 15th the A’s would need to lose two more.
I will root unabashedly for an A’s sweep and a .500/second place finish. If the A’s somehow sign a Type A and forfeit a pick as a result, I will regret nothing.
The A’s lineup appears to be a max effort one, relatively speaking. Per SuSlu: Davis cf, Barton 1b, Ellis 2b, Cust dh, Suzuki c, Kouzmanoff 3b, Carter lf, Carson rf, Pennington ss. However, per JoStig, Carson is “walking gingerly w/sore back” and could be a late scratch.
I stand with you on this, just trying to take nm’s expressed preference into account. I hate associating with long streaks of losing seasons, even though I’ve never been a Golden State Warriors fan. Maybe it comes from all the years of watching Cal football. If the Pirates had even once since 1992 finished at .500, they would not currently be completing their 18th consecutive losing season.
Ideally the Tigers win 82 and all is resolved that way. If the Tigers and A’s are the only two teams with 81 wins and thereby tie for 15th, they split their season series 3-3 so I don’t know how the tie would be settled. (PLAYOFF GAME ON MONDAY!!) And if you have a three or more way interleague tie…I’ll let somebody tell me how that one gets settled.
According to nm’s link from the other day, ties are broken based on last year’s standings. I believe the A’s would win that (get the higher pick) over all of those other teams.
I’m 95% sure that’s the right tiebreaker.
Does this mean we don’t need to lose 2 (for me/people like me)?
Correct; I didn’t recall that before. If the Tigers lose out (and they were swept in the doubleheader tonight) they will have 82 losses. One more A’s loss would be their 82nd. In that case, the A’s would benefit from the draft choice tiebreaker because in 2009 the Tigers finished 10.5 games ahead of Oakland. So the A’s “magic number” vs. the Tigers is indeed 1.