The Frankish Reich

And then there's Estonia: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-governance/e-democracy/ We may actually have the worst system. It's somehow both technologically clunky (mail/drop-off physical ballots with 19th century-type security) and susceptible to fraud or even simple error. Look at the recent reports of people voting in two different places. How is that even possible in the country that is the home of Silicon Valley? Are Democrats at fault? Sure. Are Republicans at fault? Sure - most of the opposition to simple things every other country has, like a nationally standard voter ID card, has come from the Republican/libertarian side.

To properly prepare to answer that question, I must first review the science:

I think it was obvious from my comment that I determined it was satire. As in NOT TRUE.

PFF haters: it appears that Beane is a subscriber, or at least that his people are on the same wavelength as PFF's people. Von Miller 2021 PFF rating: 88.7 (playoffs: 93.0) Compare our best pass rusher last year, Jerry Hughes: 71.1 (62.4 playoffs) [Rousseau: 70.2 was already about to pass him] And then there's the Moneyball style "same performance, less money" moves: Jamison Crowder: 64.9 Cole Beasley: 66.6 And then there's the "it is always easier to upgrade from poor to average" than from "good to great" moves: Rodger Saffold: 68.8, Bates 64.3 (they paid the man!) Compare: Boettger 59.8, Ford 46.4, Feliciano 56.7 Daquan Jones: 66.4, Settle 70.1 Compare: Star 43.5 (ouch!) My takeaway: everyone now sees the same things. We have moved closer an closer to a classic efficient market, where there isn't a whole lot of difference in pro football scouting between teams. I don't think this is the case with college scouting, particularly after the first 50 picks or so, but I suspect that that's moving in the same direction too. On Von: it's pretty apparent he was strongly influenced by DeMarcus Ware. Ware joined the Broncs at the tail end of his career, and he played at a considerably lower weight, recognizing that he couldn't play at his Cowboys weight and still be effective moving into his mid-30s. Ware had a fantastic comeback season in the Broncs SB year. And that's exactly what I saw from Von last year.

Here's the depressing thing: I saw the post here with the John Walsh tweet. It sounded kind of like satire, but a little too close for comfort, so I had to google recent news items on Tucker Carlson to see if it's true or not.

It is fascinating, isn't it? Putin has learned a lot from his friends in the US fringe media. Deny, spout preposterous lies, change the subject (here comes the "what about US atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan?) etc. etc.

black·ball /ˈblakˌbôl/ Learn to pronounce verb past tense: blackballed; past participle: blackballed reject (someone, usually a candidate applying to become a member of a private club), typically by means of a secret ballot. "her husband was blackballed when he tried to join the Country Club" Everything we know shows that Kaep was "blackballed" within the meaning of the term - teams colluded in agreeing not to sign him, at least for a significant period of time. The NFL's settlement (obviously subject to an NDA) clearly points to there being evidence of collusion. Circumstantial evidence regarding Kanter isn't as strong now, but, come on, perfectly decent backup center, not too old, speaks out against China and suddenly can't get a job in a league where guys like Javale McGee keep getting signed? I think you are arguing a different point - that individual teams would have had good reason not to sign Kaep. True, but that's not the same as collusion. And that's true too regarding Kanter, since most (all?) teams no doubt shy away from pissing off the almighty China and its revenue stream.

I think it’s even less likely that anyone signs Kanter than it was that anyone signs Kaepernick c. 2018. Both clearly and obviously blackballed. I liked Kanter as a ball player too. A defensive liability, but he always rebounded and he has some offensive game. Look around the NBA at some backup big men who are getting 12 minutes a game and it’s obvious what’s going on with Kanter. Err, Freedom.

I think you may be new here… Yes, that is precisely the kind of warped conspiratorial nonsense that is favored by some of our PPP posters. Heck, one of them even created a tribute name based on the biggest fool of them all. How the fact that the Grammy Awards took a few minutes to acknowledge that a friendly country is under bombardment by an aggressive authoritarian regime somehow portends something sinister is beyond you and me. But for these folks, it’s just another day of “football” talk. So what rabbit hole have they gone down? Hint: it starts with Q. And it ends there too. I earned my own Q Decoder Ring through hours of reading garbage like this before It All Became Clear To Me. To the Q club John Legend and wife signals baby eating monsters, now presumably with Vlad the New Impaler on the side of goodness and light against them. I wish I was making this up. But I’m not. As they say, do your own research and you’ll see how nuts they are.

In retrospect, it's probably a shame that Wade wound up signing with the Bills. He signed before the 2019 season, which was, of course, the beginning of The Bills Are Officially Good era. There just isn't any room to experiment by activating a guy like him off the PS when you're in a surprising playoff hunt (2019), much less when you're expecting to be a real playoff contender (2020-2021). Unfortunately, he's now 3 years older and minimally more NFL experienced. He's a fun story, and from that one preseason moment of glory, looks like he'd be a lot of fun to watch. Jaguars, do you really, really need to keep that kick return specialist on your 2022 roster? Because there's a guy out there that would get you some nice media coverage in your owner's beloved England ...

Title 42 is a public health authority, put in place based on a CDC finding that the entry into the United States of persons from an area where COVID-19 is prevalent poses a serious public health risk to the United States. So by urging the Biden Administration to continue using Title 42 to combat this grave public health risk, you do realize that you are adopting the position that COVID-19 poses a serious and continuing public health risk to the United States? You might want to take a look back at how you've characterized the threat posed by COVID on many of the other threads here ...

You mean not even a mid-body injury? A core injury? An upper non-extremity injury?

Gotta admit it. You had me for about 2 seconds there. Well played.

If you don't like something that your local school district is teaching, vote in new school board members. If you are outvoted in your local school district, move to another school district, or send your kids to private school, or homeschool them. And you are wrong: the Florida law targets local school districts that have added all this woke sexuality stuff into their curricula. There is no Florida state law that requires teaching these things.

Don't you find it a bit curious that the people who are always clamoring for local control of schools are suddenly all for state mandated control? By the way, other than good old fashioned reading, writing, arithmetic (and standardized high school AP type classes, to make sure all kids get the same opportunity to excel) I really do believe in local control. Maybe the Boulder Colorado (famously liberal city near me) elect a school board that thinks teaching these things is good for their kids is because the people of Boulder Colorado really think teaching these things is good for their kids. Maybe the Colorado Springs (famously conservative city near me) bans it because they think it's bad for their kids. Isn't that how it should be? Or is it local control for me but not for thee?

Regardless of what your politics are: how governments are reacting to the bump in fuel prices shows how inept they are. Example: California is considering a $400 “rebate” per licensed vehicle. Let’s say fuel prices are up 2 bucks per gallon. Let’s also assume (for the consumer market) 25 miles per gallon. That means Gov Newsom will defray the added cost of driving 5,000 miles. Do we want people to drive those 5,000 miles despite fuel costing 2 bucks a gallon more? Even setting aside environmental concerns, any economist would tell you the answer is “no.” “No” is how we get markets to reach a new fuel price equilibrium. Let’s not mess with supply/demand curves. Plus: I don’t know if it would be some kind of fuel gift card or whether it would be a straight $400 per licensed vehicle direct deposit. If the latter, people who could shift to alternate means of transportation would get a windfall to buy a new OLED TV. (3 cars = $1200). So would teleworkers. Or waiving the gas tax: the gas tax is a user fee. If you don’t drive a gas engine vehicle, you don’t pay. So road maintenance will come out of …. Sales taxes? State income taxes? Won’t be done? How does this help? Sometimes it seems like we are governed by the economically illiterate.

Nothing crack pot about these FACTS. It’s worse than I realized yesterday. - the Supreme Court had to decide whether to grant Trump’s request to quash a congressional subpoena for text messages relating to January 6. - they voted 8-1 against Trump. - THOMAS was the sole dissenting vote. - among the texts in question are those to/from MRS THOMAS and Chief Of Staff Mark Meadows. - if Clarence Thomas knew or had reason to believe that the Court’s decision here would directly involve texts to/from his wife, every judge in America would agree that he needed to recuse himself. I suppose it’s conceivable that he really didn’t know or have reason to believe this, but that really strains credibility. His single dissenting vote wouldn’t matter anyway. So what on earth was he thinking when he decided to participate in this case?

I assume that's sarcasm ...

Good point. I was thinking that happened later on ...

Thanks - I appreciate the reasonable response. I really like hearing from people with insight into a field that I don't know that much about, so I tend to assume that other people think likewise. And I know something about this kind of stuff. As someone who's worked as a lawyer with law enforcement agencies in several contexts, something still bothers me about criminal law even after many, many years: we often punish bad results more harshly than evil behavior. The inexperienced truck driver? Irresponsible, yes. But way more unlucky than anything else. Most of the time drivers doing exactly the same thing (including the truckers right behind me on that very exit) don't even cause an accident. Meanwhile someone fires shots on a downtown street at someone and misses and he's charged with a trivial gun possession crime.

Her idea -- and it's correct from my experience -- is that the possession guidelines dated from a time when people actually DID get this garbage from creeps sending it through the mail. That put kind of a practical limit on the number of images you could be convicted of possessing. When it all went to the dark web, prosecutors were able to charge a count for every temp image recovered from a hard drive. So what was once in the two digits can easily be in the three digits now. Or more.

Sentencing is messy. I'm making a general point here, not anything specific about these recent nominees. There are many cases where multiple counts run about the sentence to something absurd. I know this personally from cases I've been involved in (and never on the defense side). Here's an example from a prominent case in my neck of the woods: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2022/01/19/truck-driver-sentenced-110-years/9108405002/ Truck driver, not sufficiently experienced, from Cuba, driving on the steep descent from the Colorado mountains, onto an off ramp that (having driven it many times) is not very well designed. Barrels into other vehicles, huge crash, cars exploding, four innocent people killed. It was probably what we'd call recklessness, not intentional harm-doing. Some nonlawyers would consider it just an accident - negligence, sure, but not some kind of hardened criminal. I thought it was appropriate that he was criminally prosecuted, but I realize that's more about the horrific result than horrific behavior - with a little luck he would have flipped over his own truck and injured himself rather than killing four other people. He went to trial and was convicted on all counts. The sentencing guidelines: 110 years. It was crazy, and even law and order types like me thought "this can't be right." Ultimately the governor stepped in and commuted the sentence to something more fitting the crime: 10 years. The end result makes sense to me. It's just something to keep in mind when someone gets what seems to be an excessive sentence, or a far too lenient sentence. The guidelines are just that: guidelines. I can't tell you what someone like this truck driver should get in a perfectly fair world, but I can tell you there are gradations of creeps in all of the kinds of cases KJB passed sentences on. I've tried to avoid those cases because they are just too personally disturbing to me on many levels, but I have had some tangential involvement over the years. Judges try to do what's right. There's often a conflict between the individual case (a sad, creepy loser with no prior record), the judge's lack of total certainty about whether or not he may reoffend (often there's no evidence of a long pattern, but does this mean he just hasn't been caught before?) and the general idea that we need a strong deterrent to make anyone so inclined to go out looking for this stuff to think twice before he does it. And yes, the number of images multiplies, and each one can be a separate count. It can give a prosecutor tremendous leverage in securing a plea deal conviction, something that I think is valuable in general but that everyone should agree raises some liberty concerns when prosecutors overcharge to gain that leverage. We see this in drug cases too, where everyone seemed to reach a consensus (even Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump) that maybe the scales had tilted too far in the prosecutor's favor. Bottom line: sentencing is messy. There are some judges who are just too gullible, but almost all of them I've known are doing the best they can, so I give them the benefit of the doubt.

I don't agree with his wife's politics. And I think the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice should understand that she's not in the position of an ordinary person - there's a commitment there, a patriotic commitment to the American people that she really doesn't seem to understand. A Supreme Court Justice him or herself shouldn't be a politician. And he could've easily retired when the Repubs had the presidency and the Senate, so that argument won't work. As a Supreme Court Justice, I actually generally respect his opinions. He definitely has a judicial philosophy that is, unfortunately, a little more result-oriented than his fellow traveler Scalia (Scalia had no problem with going against the "conservatives" when he thought they had gone beyond what the constitution authorizes; Thomas is a little less confident), but still pretty grounded in solid constitutional philosophy, whether you agree or disagree with that philosophy.

No. I think this is what they call "whataboutism." There's corruption and corrupt family members of politicians everywhere. I am not about to defend all of that. We are talking about a Supreme Court Justice here -- one of just 9 people who decide whether a whole host of policies enacted by various Administrations should be allowed or should be shot down. Extreme partisanship on the part of a spouse is just bad form. It's not just election disputes (which, by the way, he did get involved in when the Supreme Court shot down some state challenges to the 2020 election); it's also a whole host of policies she is stridently advocating for or against that will inevitably wind up before the Court. Clarence and Ginni ought to (and do) know better. If her activism is that important to her, and if he loves her and thinks her mission in life is more important than his, well, he's of retirement age ... EDIT: by the way, you may or may not have seen that nominee KBJ said she would recuse herself from the Supreme Court's consideration of the Harvard affirmative action lawsuit because she was on the Harvard Board of Overseers at the time their affirmative action policy at issue was in place. This is a fair and honorable decision, and given the incredible leeway Supreme Court Justices get to make their own ethics calls, not one that she had to commit to now (she would've been confirmed anyway)

He's not conflicted in general, but ... his wife's political activism has crossed a line we just haven't seen crossed before, at least with a Supreme Court justice. By the way, I thought the same thing about that liberal lion of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the late Stephen Reinhardt. His wife was the head of the ACLU of Los Angeles, but he didn't recuse himself from cases in which she had been involved. It's just bad form and puts an ugly cloud over the integrity of a court. It's not like we're depriving Mrs. Thomas of the right to make a living - she did (and could) continue to do just fine lobbying for discrete industries like she used to. Exhibit 1,017 of Why People Hate Washington: the politicians and Justices exempt themselves from the rules that apply to everyone else, particularly everyone else with a policy-making/deciding job.