The Frankish Reich

Sometimes the smartest thing to do is to just keep your mouth shut. That was his approach when this little dust-up first hit, but he just couldn't stop himself from commenting and keeping it alive for another news cycle.

Umm, Ron DeSantis?

Damn right, Elon! Your native South Africa definitely recognized genetic differences in humans and treated them accordingly. I hear it was a modern day Garden of Eden. Why you left, I'll never know.

Ahh, a point of agreement. Which is why I'm more libertarian than anything else.

So if the government was demanding some documents that I had, claiming that they were government property, and I believed in good faith that they were actually my personal property ... I would probably hire a lawyer to fight that demand. And guess what? That's what he did. And those lawyers didn't say "we're going to court since Mr. Trump has a right to keep his personal property." No. They said, "o.k., here they are." And they verified - putting their own reputations on the line - that everything had been turned over. And then they found out Mr. Trump deceived them. And now we find out (and the chronology is key here) that the day AFTER they were subpoenaed, a Trump assistant (#4 in the superseding indictment) said he wanted surveillance footage of documents being moved around in Mar-a-Lago destroyed. If you have a good faith claim that you are entitled to keep documents, you raise it at the start. You don't say "here they are" and then hold others back. You assert your rights and let a court decide. If you don't have a good faith belief that they belong to you, you do what Trump is accused of doing.

I like how Newsom is the 4th favorite, just a tick more probable than DeSantis! And also well above Kamala. I've got a trip to the UK coming up in a bit. Maybe I should put some money on him.

I see why people advocate for this new usage, but I'm not convinced that it is something to worry about. I will note that many of the same people who are outraged (as well they should be) about sex trafficking seem o.k. about downplaying the systematic, state-sponsored trafficking of human beings in our history, even when that trafficking also included the rape of many women and girls by their "owners." I've tried to point this out. Would anyone dream of saying, "Although modern child sex trafficking is horrific, some trafficked children ultimately benefited from being taken away from starvation, war, and disease to the United States, where they were able to use their survival skills to succeed in a land of abundance and freedom"

And Hitler's Germany (oops! had to go there for historical reasons) the philosophy was all about inequality, not equality. Certain races were deemed objectively better than others. And exactly the same kind of brutality ensued. So the focus on absolute equality drove one society to brutality while the focus on genetic superiority/inferiority drove a different one to brutality. In other words, I think this explains a lot less than Musk thinks it explains.

I hope you're right. So why does Bills' management believe he needs to run less? Why does Josh agree? If there's no problem, why not stick with what's been successful? Maybe it's not the risk of cumulative breakdown by the time he's 33; maybe it's the greater likelihood of getting injured in THIS particular season, and missing multiple games (or heaven forbid, the rest of the season)? My suggestion was that the most likely explanation is that Bills' management DOES think that if he continues to run at this pace he WILL breakdown earlier than otherwise. After all, he's under contract through his age 32 season now, so the team has a vested interest in his long(ish)-term health. Digression: easier to think about this type of thing in baseball since they don't have franchise tags, etc. Shohei Otani is one of the greats of baseball history already. No one has ever done what he's doing - arguably both the best pitcher and the best hitter in baseball. Never before, maybe never again. He's a free agent after this year. The Angels have no "vested interest" in his future health. They're not very good, but they may make the playoffs. They still pitch Otani every 6th day (I think). Why not ride him harder? Use him up? He's of zero value to you after 2023, and most people expect him to leave Anaheim. My point: if Josh were a free agent after 2023 - MLB style, not "franchise tags" and all of that - I'd say "run more, not less!" The Bills offense is at its best when he's using his legs as well as his arm. Even if he's not running that much, the threat means defenses put a spy on him, and that spy makes it a lot easier to find open men with one less defender in coverage or pass rushing. So it works! But of course that's not the case ...

I'm not sure. This is an interesting question in social science. I'm many decades removed from really studying this stuff, but here's what I remember. - A lot of old social theorists had an unusual take on this. There were the old school religious thinkers/theologians: a world with God - without fear of God - was a world in which social discipline couldn't be maintained. Successful civilizations are therefore always based on belief in a God or gods. There's punishment by governments for disobeying norms, but that's not enough. You have to fear eternal damnation or something akin to that for violating norms. - Newer (more atheistic if you will) social theorists took it meta. Whether there's actually a God or gods isn't the point. It is important that societies believe (at least in large part) that there is a God or gods, even if there isn't one. (There is of course something elitist here - they were the enlightened atheists, but that masses needed belief, or false belief, to behave). Marx kind of thought the same thing, but he thought it was the powers that be, the capitalists, who required the masses to believe so that they would behave themselves and not throw off their shackles. The whole opiate of the people thing. - But newer theorists have noted the obvious. We have a lot of ostensibly god-fearing societies that are "low trust" societies, riddled with corruption, crime, disorder. We have a lot of nonreligious societies that are "high trust" where people behave themselves remarkably well and cooperatively despite not believing in a higher power. Indonesia: highly religious mess or corruption. Denmark: highly nonreligious rule followers. And everything in between. In fact, if you graph countries by percent who are religious on the Y axis and some kind of corruption index on the X axis, good luck finding a line you can draw. So I doubt the proposition is true.

I chose Singapore not because that's the goal (most Americans would find their level of law and order over personal freedom unacceptable), but because that's the polar opposite of anything goes San Francisco. And because Singapore just isn't a very religious place, undermining the idea that belief in God (or gods ... there's a fair number of Hindus there too) is somehow necessary if one is to have what's called a "high trust society."

I've been clear about my opinion: the good economic numbers don't mean "Bidenomics" is working. But any criticism of Biden - any fair criticism (do we have that here?) - has to acknowledge that the U.S. economy is in far better shape than any of our competitors in the post-pandemic world. Maybe that says more about the resilience of our people or our economy than it does about White House/governmental policy. Maybe it says more about how the ostensibly independent Fed has managed inflation than it does about the performance of the political branches. Whatever. It's still a fact, and it's a fact that every incumbent President knows will accrue to his advantage. https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd8d9 Europe has fallen behind America and the gap is growing From technology to energy to capital markets and universities, the EU cannot compete with the US https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4123768-surprisingly-strong-economy-shifts-political-calculations/

Those godless Singaporeans seem awfully law abiding

Well he gets credit (deserved or not) for somehow squeezing a sort of decent season out of the otherwise completely inept Blake Bortles. I'm still not sure how that happened.

There's a little Bill Parcells there. But there's also a little Rex Ryan.

Maybe. I'll admit that. But a lot of the guys on the list weren't EJ Manuels. They were top QBs in their prime years. We are talking about guys like Culpepper, Wilson, McNabb, Newton. What surprised me is that not a single one of them lasted as an effective QB past age 34. I had to go back a quarter century to find Steve Young as the outlier. So fair criticism. But I still think there's something there. And obviously Allen and his coaches think there's something there too.

Good question. I thought about that. The quick answer is: that's why I limited the list to QBs who racked up a lot of rushing yards over at least two full seasons. In other words, starting QBs who had some record of success. There are a lot of non-running QBs who would meet a similar threshold for passes thrown/passing yards per game, etc., who washed out equally young. Think EJ Manuel. I'm not sure there's a good way to control for this.

Explain then. Because it looks to me like another ignorant meme-poster who doesn't understand what money laundering means. Which is ok because the people who follow him don't understand it either.

Interesting. He spread the money around all right, mostly (at least visibly) to Democrats and the Dem party, but lots to Republicans too. And he accomplished the apparent goal: crypto trading not being treated as securities trading. Another moral of the story: these charges were dropped because the Bahamas wouldn't extradite him if they were in play. Bahamas gotta protect all their other shady businesses making big political contributions ... So make sure to flee to the Bahamas before the law comes down on you.

I kinda think we all do.

Whatever. Republicans know the Fed is going to raise interest rates, that that will drive up loan/mortgage rates and give them an anti-Biden/Dem talking point, so they schedule UFO hearings to drown out that talking point. Just give up already.

Allow me to recharacterize: so nothing good has ever come out of San Francisco.

Kinda milfy. I give her a pass.

So we all agree that the tweet you posted - the one about the UFO Hearings being convened to distract from the Fed's interest rate decision - was stupid?

I just did go to the gas station. $3.49. Which is up significantly from summer 2019 (the last fair comparison), but a lot lower than peak summer 2008, even in real terms. Oh, and on the “education” thread I just noted that you can make a hindred or so PBJ sandwiches for ten bucks. I’m not ascribing the good economic news solely, or even in significant part, to Biden. I am pointing out that there’s a Republican panic starting to well up. What if the economy actually looks good a year from now? Is anti-trans mania the issue we have to run on?