Jake

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.

I usually enjoy the ASG but I won't watch if there >4 Royals starting. On the bright side, I think this travesty might convince MLB to can the fan voting other than the last man.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jun 15, 2015 -> 08:41 PM) So Joel Embiid had a setback and could miss another year? Sam Bowie

QUOTE (Joshua Strong @ Jun 14, 2015 -> 07:52 PM) I think he could be a good 4th OFer I think he's at least a year away from it being a defensible developmental decision to not given him regular at bats at some level.

God I'm watching this press conference and they are peppering David Blatt with just ludicrous questions

I'll start by acknowledging that this is about the easiest time to bring up this argument, but does anyone else think that LeBron may soon start to turn that corner where, physically, he's just not the same guy anymore? Maybe the better question isn't whether those athletic abilities are on the decline but instead whether it matters.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Jun 14, 2015 -> 10:56 PM) Like who? It's more of a general statement than me believing this Cleveland team can win. In general, if you find yourself needing 25+ FGA per game from LeBron, your team is probably screwed.

For all that he does so well, LeBron as volume shooter is rarely a winning formula for his teams. MJ could routinely average 25-28 FGA/G with decent enough efficiency but that's not LBJ at his best. LBJ is best when shooting crazy efficient, distributing on offense, and making his presence felt on D. I'm actually becoming suspect of how much of a defensive player he can be anymore from all the mileage, but we see that offensive juggernaut all the time. Not in this series/with this version of CLE, though. I mean, there are some great distribution numbers, but he shouldn't be taking 35 shots. Someone else on his team needs to touch the ball.

Steph Curry just chucked up a 35 foot three with nobody guarding him and 9 seconds on the shot clock and drained it to put GS up by 11 in 90 seconds left. There's your signature game.

It's funny, given all the criticism, that Tortorella casually dropped Crawford's name as the presumptive Conn Smythe winner on ESPN today. Would make up for him getting jobbed in 2013, at least.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Jun 4, 2015 -> 12:52 PM) When I hated the Gordon Beckham signing it was for three reasons. 1.) It rendered Bonifacio's signing useless (or at least a poor allocation of funds) as Beckham took his principal role. - This still holds true. Bonifacio has been underutilized and is a wart, relatively speaking, on the payroll. 2.) Beckham has never been a good defender at 3B - The Sox scouts were right on his defense. He has passed the eye test and been incredible. 3.) Beckham is not a platoon bat. I kept saying that Beckham has sucked equally against RHP and LHP over the course of his 3000+ PAs. - He has been garbage against LHP once again. RHP: .302./357/.508/.865, 70 PAs LHP: .240/.333/.240/.573, 30 PAs I do think Gillaspie should only start 1-3 times a week against RHSP with good fastballs until Beckham cools. We can't build a pitching staff on guys who manufacture ground balls and throw Conor Gillaspie and Micah Johnson out there. Obviously you can't put much credence into splits of a role player in June but his career has been fun to follow in a statistical sense. Beckham has been a guy who is completely neutral in his career as far as LHP/RHP splits. RHP: .247/.306/.379/.685 and LHP: .243/.315/.368/.683 That is nearly identical. That is what you get with a proper sample size. His statistics on a year-to-year basis are a great token to the ideas that you A.) you cannot put weight into small sample sizes and B.) everything regresses to the mean. I am jumping all over the place but some of you want to freak out and say the Sox are the worst organization in the world because Melky, Eaton, Alexei and LaRoche aren't hitting to your expectations right now but don't go overboard. Things will regress the mean. If this team sucks in the end there's no prize for the one's who were saying it from April 9th, we all suffer together. Don't fret over the the day to day to results. We have eight weeks to wait for the regression. Regarding the platoon business, since he has spent much of the season in a sort of platoon role, you can't take his splits from this year as evidence that he still doesn't hit lefties any better. By and large, he has been protected from the toughest righties, so we might just say that Robin has managed his ABs well. Of course, it is very plausible and maybe even likely that he has been about equally effective against both LHP and RHP because that's just his natural tendency prior to last season.

I do wonder to what extent some of our disagreements on police incidents is rooted in different ideas of what police are for and what we expect of them. I think there is some degree to which some see police as perfectly normal civilians doing a particular job where they should be held to the same standard as anyone at any job. Others see police as one of a few very special positions in society where we expect something beyond the typical job performance.

So is it a MLB deal?

QUOTE (Alpha Dog @ Jun 11, 2015 -> 05:45 PM) http://nypost.com/2013/01/27/city-says-cop...subdued-killer/ Go ahead and read that Greg. But you might want to sit down first. I'm not sure if I understand the sequence of events. The madman enters the train after having been recognized by the cop, the cop hides, the madman tries to kill a man, once the man who was stabbed disarms the madman, the cop comes out of hiding? Or am I missing some nuance to the story? The city's defense that they can't simply take responsibility for every bad thing that happens of course makes sense, as does the argument that there could be times that the measures needed to protect a single person could jeopardize the safety of many others. But the way I'm reading it is that the cop just waited for the madman to finish his business before acting, which seems indefensible

I think Crawford, outside of the last game, hasn't been great but is far from the major reason we're in such a close series. Our skaters have not played that well. The Roszival injury is hurting a lot and every d-man outside of the Keith/Hjalmarsson tandem has been terrible at times, while Cumiskey/Van Riemsdyk/Timonen have all been terrible the majority of their time on the ice. We had gotten little production out of our top line until last night. The bright side is that the series is tied and we're rooting for the Blackhawks. They are the team, of all those I root for, that I get least stressed about. I've felt fairly pessimistic at times throughout the postseason, but with the Hawks there's always that thought in your mind that they could turn it on at any moment. Even better, I feel extremely confident that they won't fold. They're capable of being outplayed, but not of giving up or getting rattled by the moment.

Crawford won us that one. I'd like to see us get a win where it really feels like we win in all phases.

Reserve d-men are just playing terribly. Dumb mistakes every shift.

I'm really excited about Rodon, but he still has two big things to prove. First, we haven't seen him throw strikes consistently in the MLB and it was something he fought in his last year at NC State as well. The other thing is I'd like to see a third pitch. You occasionally see dominant starters that pretty much just throw two pitches, but it's not an easy route to success. Throwing a serviceable change about 15-20% of the time would make it infinitely harder for hitters to get comfortable against him. Since the comparisons to Sale are inevitable, it's worth mentioning that Sale had a very advanced changeup from the start and we never really saw him struggle with command. With that said, Rodon has his own advantages, namely that he's built like a tank and has a conventional, relatively low effort motion.