Jake

Chris is also a top 50 pitcher

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Jul 2, 2015 -> 12:17 PM) Because of your very good friend John Danks I agree and it made sense at the time to go with John Danks. Little did we know that Danks not only would get hurt, but would get hurt almost immediately upon signing his deal and hurt in such a way that he'd never be anything close to his old self. What's interesting is that he seems to have fared better than other guys who have had capsule tears in the recent past - Johan Santana and Dallas Braden come to mind.

Dude. 4/40 to Iman Shumpert? What a joke. Feel free to read that in Stephen A Smith voice

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 1, 2015 -> 11:08 AM) Because of all of the Ex-Sox prospects who have turned into stars around MLB? Realized the other day that if none of our prospects turn into stars and none of our ex-prospects turn into stars, that just means we don't even get top talent to step foot into our system

The bulking up excuse is my favorite. "I'm playing bad because I did a good thing, so you can't really be mad"

Yeah, they're just trolling Sox fans

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 30, 2015 -> 12:50 AM) Never seen it in nearly 30 years as a PT/ATC and I've been in plenty of operating rooms. My experience has mostly in athletics however so my experience is mostly with orthopedic surgeons not internal med guys. you can bet they all are giving their best efforts if only from a liability/law suit perspective. However, don't you need to have a "special" sense of humor to perform colonoscopies on a regular basis? Isn't there some saying about opinions and assholes?

Adopting adult dogs from a shelter is great for a couple of reasons. First of all, you're saving a dog that at best will lead a life of limited human attention and a complete lack of autonomy and at worst is facing imminent euthanasia for no reason other than lack of space. But second is that the vast majority of adult dogs you could adopt from a shelter will not give you the same pains that you get from a puppy. You have to teach a puppy that it has to pee/poop outside, for god's sake, which is far from an overnight endeavor. You will also be able to know the temperament of the dog you adopt from a shelter because it has grown up. Puppies are almost always crazy, but a good portion of them become mellow adults. You won't really know which you're getting when you adopt so young. But an adult dog is pretty much itself...obviously moving into a new home will change some things, but not its basic disposition. I think of this in contrast to cats (who hold a special place in my heart of course) who are more disrupted by changing homes/owners once they are adults. That's not to say adopting adult cats is bad! But kitten socialization is 1. easy and 2. far more permanent, IMO. Dogs have been domesticated a long time and with some exceptions of abuse, are hard to break of their love for human friends. Cats that didn't have the kind of human interactions you would like to have with them when kittens will be pretty unlikely to have them when they are adults. Anyway, thanks for helping out animals in need Alpha! The amount of homeless animals in our communities is so sad that it tends to be easier just to keep a distance rather than get emotionally invested. Props to you for being involved and helping.

It is so potentially far-reaching that it's hard to summarize which specific interests are hurt and helped. I know one of the first times I heard about it they had discovered that it would increase the time before artistic works go into the public domain (and it would impose the same the timeframe on other signatories, which would be its explicit purpose for being in the agreement). Shortly thereafter, there was a lot of talk about drastic increases in drug prices for most of the non-American countries involved as a measure to protect American pharmaceutical companies. But there is just a lot, a lot to it. As far as I can understand, it's a strange legal position for all parties since it in many places contradicts domestic laws.

I don't know what it says about me or human nature or healthcare in general, but my first reaction to that story was "well at least they restricted it to verbal abuse"

With each coming year, betting big on the top tier FAs looks more like a fool's errand

The next time a kid comes down to UIUC and KU, Groce will surely mention what happened to old Cliffy

QUOTE (Y2JImmy0 @ Jun 27, 2015 -> 06:44 PM) Q wasn't a fan apparently. Saw that on twitter That's fine, but it doesn't mean you have to give him a way for a dime-a-dozen level prospect

Raanta trade is a bit of a head scratcher to me. I, for one, liked him and still see him as a potential #1 on a good team. I'm not against trading him in general, but the return makes it look like a salary dump even though the kid wasn't making any money.

There are so many aspects to the polygamy argument that I really don't know what to think of it. It is indeed difficult to argue against it without making arguments that could easily be confused for anti-gay marriage or similar concerns. Interestingly, polygamous marriages/relationships do indeed have clear connections to at least the biblical era (in scripture) and probably before. I think the recent debate has seemingly codified marriage as 1. romantic and 2. dyadic. With that said, it isn't as if there have been explicit arguments about why it needs to be dyadic, it's just that that aspect wasn't the one people wanted to be reconsidered. I think a lot of the sympathy for SSM is the knowledge that we are almost all bound to want romantic relationships, but not everyone is hardwired to want those with the opposite sex. I think we already acknowledged that people can want multiple romantic partners, but that one of the main points of marriage was to narrow it down to two people. With that said, it isn't as if two has always been the number or promoting fidelity was always the intention (or is always the intention now). SSM was found unconstitutional because any two people could enter into this partnership, except they couldn't. Some dyads couldn't due to an arbitrary characteristic (gender), which many now recognize isn't as cut-and-dry as we'd like to think anyway. More important was the aforementioned natural sexual and emotional urges that nearly every single person feels, though not always towards the same gender. I think we also feel and acknowledge a general urge toward at least sexual relationships with numerous people, but see that as an undesirable trait for society. My immediate reaction is that I don't support it, but I'm sure there is a ton of argument to be had about it if there really is will for it. I'm not ardently opposed.

FanGraphs' BaseRuns projection has diagnosed the A's as seriously underachieving all year long

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Jun 26, 2015 -> 08:06 AM) I think Larry Nance Jr. may need an even more sincere apology today http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nba-ball-don...-054648201.html I don't want to open this can of worms too much, but there's a decent chance he's not wrong about Kobe being a rapist. Still not a good look, especially when you're only saying it to make a point about him fouling people

Hey, if we can agree that the interests of private businesses frequently conflict with that of the public, we might be getting somewhere

I'd say the non-wealthy got at least one really good, really important thing under this POTUS that could very well be threatened if a Republican is elected

There are many otherwise reasonable people who live in the South who really don't think the stars and bars represent something very bad. This is because they were taught that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and that the implication that it had anything to do with race or slave ownership was purely revisionist history. Those who have been challenged on these points will often respond with seemingly damning facts like that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't even free Union slaves. Of course, these things miss the forest for the trees, but they come up. Not all feel this way, of course, that would be painting with far too broad of a brush. But this is not a position held only be the extreme racist or backwoods types. People of many statuses and who should know better don't because they were raised with the reality of the flag being a positive, not a negative symbol -- even if at the same time they think institutional racism and the slave-owning past it came from were also bad things. It's not some anomaly that a poll just months ago found that 66% of South Carolinians wanted to keep the stars and bars flying in the capitol.

Reading his little "manifesto" makes it relatively clear to me that he is not insane. His self-described ideology is more or less logically coherent, just based on what are obviously false premises (he holds misconceptions about the prevalence of black on white crime and the lived experiences of slaves, among other things). It doesn't read all that differently than some of the stuff that was influential in Nazi Germany or was getting published in American academic journals in the early 1900s. Roof basically felt that American society was being especially harmed by the presence of black people who he thinks are biologically/genetically inferior beings and he is disappointed that the white power movement is just a bunch of people talking on the internet, so he didn't want to stand idly by as society crumbled, in his opinion. Misguided? Of course. Evil? Absolutely. Crazy? I'm not so sure. Only if we just say that anyone who kills a person is insane which of course absolves everyone of responsibility for everything they do.

At 16, she'll have to wait a bit I assume. Hopefully she can play some more legitimate competition, but again when she's just 16 there are lots of stateside prospects that haven't seen future pro competition at that age. What they didn't say is how big she is. I wonder if she has pro size.

So we gave a bunch of money to Melky who has been horrible, which isn't entirely unsurprising though nobody would have expected him to be THIS bad. We traded our most viable option for 2B for a starting pitcher in the last year of his contract. That pitcher hasn't pitched well and 2B has been an absolute mess. We did not address the catcher position and it has been predictably horrible. We didn't address 3B and it's been bad. We failed to foresee Alexei's fall, ruining the fact he had a great deal of trade value before the season began. I don't necessarily think that Hahn needs to get fired, but Hahn was in charge of putting together a team that was highly likely to be bad and is bad.

Firing Kenny Williams wouldn't do anything positive and it would probably hurt. If you're going to fire front office people, you've got to clean house.

Obama has been saying he hasn't given up on gun reform but it's clear that he has by the context of his comments. He's a smart man and he knows he can't pass laws that will make a truly significant dent in our problem. Could we make improvements? Sure. But that's like a 500 pound man saying he could definitely shed 10 if he wanted to. Emphases mine, of course. This is a president who recognizes that the problem is simple. There are a ton of guns out there and for most of the cases in which they kill someone, there isn't a reasonable policy that could have directly prevented it. We can't take the guns that already exist out of people's hands and that's the only way to really eliminate this problem. We can only hope that people lose interest in owning them and gradually realize they do more harm than good.