The Frankish Reich

Ouch. Our interior line play has often been so bad that Brown's bad play has kind of gotten a pass. He's Beane/McD's project, and yes, he has incredible size and athleticism, but like a lot of projects he still may be a couple years away from becoming a good RT. That would fit really well with some teams. Not so well with a team with a win-now roster.

I was once on a hiring committee where I voted “no” because an applicant mixed up “discrete” and “discreet.”

Just go away already. someone please quote this so he can’t deny he’s reading it. what an obnoxious poster.

Well said. I voted for Mitt Romney. I would have voted for Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or Chris Christie. But now? There's a few mild-mannered candidates making gestures toward normalcy (Tim Scott?), but even if they could get through the primaries, the Republican Party is bereft of ideas at the congressional and think tank level. Trump killed it. It or some other successor will have to be rebuilt from the ground up, like an NFL team tanking and trading their entire starting lineup for draft picks.

I am old enough to remember 1992. Bush 41: the economy is improving! Clinton: to hell with your statistics. "I feel your pain." Fast forward to 2023. Republicans are now the feminized party of "but we don't FEEL like it's getting better." Democrats: but look at the data!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-u-s-economy-is-sticking-the-soft-landing-cf140c04?mod=hp_lead_pos1 From the very Republican Wall Street Journal: To see what an economic soft landing looks like, search no further than business hiring. Parts of the economy are cooling, just as the Federal Reserve would like to see to combat inflation. Freight railroads, for instance, are seeing shipping volumes decline. Construction firms are cutting back on equipment purchases. A vending-machine company’s customers are negotiating prices downward. Yet the key to a measured, inflation-busting slowdown that doesn’t sink the economy lies in whether companies hold on to workers or lay them off. And the answer, in an economy that otherwise can send repeated mixed signals, is clear: They are making a priority of keeping workers. Apple, for one, is avoiding layoffs despite economic uncertainty. All those retained workers, in turn, are spending their paychecks, albeit more slowly. So the economy appears to be steadily cooling, while averting the long-anticipated recession.

It is. And as Deek schooled me, "surprisingly affordable." 😀

Yes. It's a rule of politics. Let the news cycle run. It would come back later (Tim Scott for one will try to keep it alive), but at least DeSantis could get back on track talking about transgenderism and wokism, the #1 issue on 1% of the country's mind according to a recent poll. Smart guy, stupid campaign.

I'm not comparing Allen to Ohtani. I'm saying the Bills have been very public about their desire to see Allen run less. And I'm saying this is rational IF they think running is going to cause him to wear down earlier than he otherwise would. And that's because they've hitched their wagon to him up through his Age 32 season. Before the long term contract, the incentives were different. Again: there's a reason the Bills are urging this. My original post goes to why they may be thinking along these lines.

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.