Wilbur

It is almost like chasing traditional Republicans out of the party functions, including the long-serving administrators and operators, is a bad idea for Trump. But sure, replace them with nouveau riche blowhards who are big into social media and culture wars, but can't do paperwork, that'll turn out fine.

I guess if you compare the cost of a Patriot missile <$6 million> versus the expense report of a guy (three hotel nights, one return first class train ticket, four days' per diem for meals, dry cleaning, tips for the concierge who gave directions to the airbase, reimburse $5 ATM fee, taxis, bottles of cheap, flammable alcohol, porter tips for luggage) who wanders out onto the airfield and sets fire to a fighter-bomber by hand <$458.32>, the hand-delivered destruction is a reasonable and economical model.

This just demonstrates the uselessness of the current crop of GOP primary candidates for president. You don't have to smear him personally! - You could point to his total lack of a political platform and the absolute absence of creative political plans. - You could point to his record of not attending his own cabinet meetings and his own briefing while he held the office. - You could point to his complete failure to work with the Senate or Congress to create or pass any meaningful legislation, reform or improvement of government, etc. - You could point to his lack of achievement in working with America's allies abroad to form coalitions to achieve our nation's goals, and spending his time instead cozying up to dictators. - You could point to the failure of American federal response to the Covid plague, and the lack of leadership in a time of crisis. - You could point to Republicans' continued defeats at the polls during his term, and the inability to achieve success at the ballot box of those candidates he has chosen and endorsed, leading to wins by candidates who are Democrats. These are just the most blatant, obvious political failures! There isn't anything personal in this, it is just his resume! Only Christie has the goolies to talk about it - the rest of the candidates just fold their hands and avert their eyes, much like the GOP national party leadership.

It was nice to see Fabinho and Firmino sitting together at Anfield to cheer on their former teammates.

Both of them were adequately described by Sgt. Joe Friday years ago.

These dip$hits live untethered to the real world. My grandfathers and grand-uncles, hard core Republicans all, spent three years traipsing around Africa and Europe killing Germans who carried that around, wasting a huge chunk of their lives and health to put them away. They would be ashamed to see the Republican party associated in any way with a swastika, but no, Trump is basically cribbing Hitler these days. Nazis are losers. Fascists are losers. The whole ideal of authoritarianism is against the ideals that Ike and the Republican party have always stood for. It is insanity to embrace that garbage. Now I am going to have to turn on the festive music to get back in the mood before everyone else wakes up for Christmas morning. Ugh.

One of Tomlin's strengths is absolutely man-management. During his time with the Steelers, he mostly kept some real problem characters in line and focused on playing the game. And he did so without letting the issues with those characters get into the media, unless those characters leaked it themselves. He generally kept Big Ben, who is a self-absorbed anti-leader, generally playing well and smoothed out BB's many conflicts with his teammates that BB generated himself by running his mouth on places like his radio show. He kept a lid on Antonio Brown's bizarro behavior for years, and dealt with him in such a way that allowed Brown to experience success on the field to an enormous extent. Only Brown's own broadcasting of his own insanity (filming the lacker room, etc.) at the end, after years, finally let the cat out of the bag about what kind of stuff he was up to. He got James Harrison and his crew to play (mostly) within the lines, and he gave them a focus point for their nutso aggression. They would come down here to Scottsdale and train at a local sport medicine place in the summer, and I would sit and watch them play a sort of beach volleyball with 50-lb. medicine balls on some days at our local park. They were always talking trash to each other about what "T" would want and what his expectations were. He kept Lamar Woodley on task for almost his entire Steelers career, but as soon as Woodley overtly indicated that he would rather eat than perform, he shipped him off to the NFL Old Folks' Home in Phoenix. I could go on, but Tomlin is the coach that can probably get the most out of a talented but personally undisciplined player. Since player salaries are Expense No. 1, and failure to extract talent is Risk No. 1 for an NFL team, he is an incredibly valuable coach. I loved Cowher, and he had his own gifts and talents, but he lacked this particular vision for flawed players.

The Arsenal goal, why did they stop the game for four minutes to look at VAR? One glance should have been enough to say Gabriel wasn't offsides, so what were they looking at?

His early stuff had a lot of re-printings in various paperback forms and is available freely around the web: The-Lure-of-the-Basilisk.pdf (readerslibrary.org) The same is true with his short stuff, which was included regularly in a lot of anthologies that were a popular year-end product back in the day. Particularly the Hugo-award-winning Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers - Wikipedia, which is all over the place. His Facebook page is the typical grumpy-old-man reports of his travels with his wife to various cons (China this past month, for instance) with a dash of humor here and there, and regular reports on how many pages he got down each day in each of the three or four stories he has on the boil. GRRM should be so transparent on his progress. I don't want to make you think he is a transformative writer. Just very competent, busy and a little off the mainstream in terms of his product. I like his world building.

Since Ser Not Appearing plans to eventually feature a novel by Lawrence Watt-Evans on his podcast, I was prompted to take one with me on the family trip to the cabins on Lake Patagonia State Park this past week. I chose the first book of The Lords of Dûs, which is The Lure of the Basilisk. Fortunately, I still possess the original paperbacks, which featured some excellent cover art, unlike the heated garbage of later re-printings. LWE is a very workmanlike author from the 70s / 80s / 90s, very much in the line of John Maddox Roberts, in that he wrote (and still does write) a lot of books and stories published in various mags, and his writing is technically proficient. Futhermore, much like John Maddox Roberts, the stuff he writes has nothing to do with popular conventions or trends current when he is writing. You can't read their books and guess within five years the publishing date such as you can with a lot of other writers from that time period. I don't know how popular writers like LWE or JMR are in the Eastern US, but their books are among those that you can still run across in used book stores in Western states. But I digress. The singular attraction of The Lure of the Basilisk (click me!) is that the plot does not follow the traditional quest milestones or usual twists and turns. First of all, the protagonist is an Overman, the result of magical experimentation and a race defeated by humans three centuries past. Unmotivated by sex or greed or the lust for power, he seeks something quite different. As in many other LWE works, the process of achieving his goals is described in detail, and if you are a reader who finds that JRR Tolkien could have eased off the poetry and explained in slightly more detail exactly how you climb a cliff wearing a loaded pack, then this is the book for you. In this manner, LWE touches on the territory of Jack Vance, who never, ever wrote a story with a straight storyline where the reader can predict what will happen next. LWE doesn't delve quite as deeply into the random plotline mines, but you are not necessarily going to find the story going in the direction you expect. And the same is true of the three following books in the storyline. LWE himself doesn't seem to hold these books in high regard, but I find their sheer novelty of unexpected plotlines very refreshing. In fact, I had forgotten how much I enjoy this aspect of these books until this week. For this reason alone, these are great to read.

All of those are classic LWE. I look forward to whatever you discuss.

And this is a concise summary of the risks of failure for American efforts in Ukraine. Institute for the Study of War (@TheStudyofWar)

I recommend watching this interview with a Ukrainian infantry commander, who shows his mastery of personnel management in a warzone. WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated): "This interview with one of the members of the Avdiivka garrison was recorded in November. "Zam", a company commander, has been in Avdiivka for many months now. He first saw massive Russian columns advancing on his positions on 10 October '23. This interview will give you an idea of the cost of holding off the hordes, and a truthful, unique insight into the mindset of a Ukrainian commander. Source: https://youtu.be/hEnb2-eXlaQ" | nitter Successfully re-incorporting refuseniks into an effective unit is impressive rehabilition.

Yes, please give us a specific update when you do a podcast of these re-reads. It is always nice to hear someone else re-visit a book they appreciated in childhood, and to hear their adult impressions. Lawrence Watt-Evans is of particular interest to me - will you be doing The Lords of Dûs or something else?

Does Eddie Murphy have a Fountain of Youth? The man never looks any older.

What, are they all thirteen years old? Once you are old enough to drive, you probably need to be able to manage unsupervised play without a punch-up. https://defector.com/ja-morant-hearing-stupid-questions

Five dollars says he shows up, looking dazed and confused, in a trench near Avdiivka, wearing a tracksuit with running shoes and armed with a rusty AK-47 without ammo. Seems like de rigueur activity for jailed Russians these days.

I also like good defense. For instance, the IST championship game was an outstanding defensive performance from the Lakers. They had a solution to slow the Pacers, then to wreck the PNR. And they had Anthony Davis playing at his top form, which was a show. But they aren't going to play at that level of intensity all season long. No team will, the season is just too long. Offense, and especially good offense, is easier to play, so it overwhelms the effort on defense in the 82-game season. The sweet spot is to break the season into two 30-ish game halves, one before the IST, and one after. The IST should be a single-elimination tourney between Thanksgiving and Christmas, with the winner (and maybe runners-up) obtaining some advantage in the playoffs. (Play the IST final somewhere meaningful, like The Palestra or Butler Fieldhouse, not Vegas. Maybe even The Pit or The Octagon of Doom. The television scenes would be amazing, and the NBA could charge $10,000 a "seat" in the cracker boxes.) So you get 30 games prior to Thanksgiving (got to start a little earlier), the IST, the second 30, and then the real playoffs and finals concluded in May. Nice long summer break. All the players have fewer stress fractures and so on, a little less need to load manage, we might get some more intense defensive effort, and the games are worth more. Lakers-in-the-IST-final defense plus modern offense all season long, a break for bad team to recover and revise, a Christmas final in The Palestra, and healthy team in the playoffs? Commissioner Silver needs to get to this, instanter.

We need to load these up on ships headed to Ukraine. WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated): "Ukrainians on the importance of Bradley M2A2." | nitter

We went to see The Boy and The Heron, Hayao Miyazaki's latest Studio Ghibli film. As you would expect, it is lushly beautiful, and the score is achingly top notch. The story has multiple levels, from the historical to the personal to the psycho-sexual to the environmental, and also (as you would expect) eschews the three-act format. Instead, we get several layers of harmony, disunion, and new harmony as the plot works its weird way through to the end. Miyazaki's films have plotlines that (to a Western viewer) resemble nothing so much as that of a Jack Vance novel, but they do work for Japanese cultural expectations. So I recommend it, but much like Spirited Away or Ponyo, you need to go with the flow in terms of the story development. This is a much less fraught film that Grave of the Fireflies, although it is initially set in a tragedy of the firebombing of Tokyo. The themes of death and resilience are far less material, and the outcomes and risk of failure for the characters is much lower. We spent over an hour discussing it over dinner afterwards, so it was well worth the watch. See it in the theater. We saw the subtitled version, and the Japanese-fluent among our group were OK with the subs in terms of communicating the story.

It will be a shame to lose out on the opportunity to watch Matip gallop forward in an ungainly manner with the ball, through a bemused midfield, to lead an unexpected attack on goal. He seems like a good fellow, too, in much the same way the team was full of cheerful teammates there for a good while under Klopp.

Another auto-recommendation from the local library for me was Noble Smith's Sons of Zeus, a first book of The Warrior Trilogy set in Green Platea during the early years of the Peloponnesian War. The audiobook was read by excellent performer Elijah Alexander. I would call this a very good adventure story set in Classical Greece. It is a hearty yarn during the height of the rivalry between Platea and Thebes, within the scope of the overall competition between Sparta and Athens, as well as the deterioration of the Delian League. It has all the hallmarks of the adventure story surrounding a young man coming of age, and it has reasonable accouterments of the Hellene society of the time. There are forbidden loves, battles, spies, political intrigue, mysterious strangers, betrayals, etc. None of what happens is all that very surprising, and the author really loves a fake-out plotline. However, the main characters have such obvious plot armor that the reader cannot believe anything really bad will happen to them. Convenient foreign characters appear as metics or slaves or ex-slaves to help the main characters progress toward their goals. Historical characters are very far in the background, and the action does fall within acceptable historical storylines. It also suffers from a terrible case of Star Wars syndrome, where almost all of the main characters are either (sometimes secret!) blood relations or have key intertwining backstories. In a place as large as Greece, surely there are some characters who have not previously loved / hated / been the father of the other characters in the story. I feel like the story would not have suffered significantly if the characters were NOT connected by some such links. Authors, it is OK for random people to interact and generate their own drama. I think that this would work very well for younger readers, however, despite my griping about the technical weaknesses. Less experienced readers aren't going to notice those issues, and the story moves along with the necessary pace and style to keep the reader turning the pages. I will definitely read the next book in the trilogy. Edit for P.S. - Maybe this isn't a great book for all younger readers, as it includes a chapter that has several references to various sexual activities featuring a mixture of participants in about four scenes. Classical Greeks had some wide-ranging sexual mores, and the author decided to cover most of them seemingly all at once to check it off the list about a third of the way into the book.

Kalbear, you are correct in your framing of the situation. My question is why the Biden administration seems to be doing so little to get the Big Administrivia Train rolling through the countryside of Rules & Regulations that need to be satisfied and completed to get more gear to Ukraine. There are many good and reasonable regulatory steps and approvals that need to be cleared to send munitions to another country. We know this, and we are blessed that they exist. But they are gates that can and should be passed, and it doesn't seem like the administration shows much of a sense of urgency to start the work necessary to pass those gates. The regulatory runway to successful launch of munitions to Ukraine is a long one. Why not start the run-up early and often, so that we can actually Do The Thing and send them what they need?

This is a good recommendation. The librarian at the British Council saw that I had checked out a Margery Allingham mystery and recommended them to 11-year-old me, and so I read the three that they had in the stacks. Tey has a style that is transparent, a stylist who writes to be easily read and comprehended, smooth and without interruption, very much in the mode of C.S. Lewis. As an adult, her stories have that underlying theme of right action, or ethics in humanity, that Fragile Bird describes, without being mawkish.

Buy the cheapest dash cam you can find and install it, front and rear. Almost every dash cam uses the same CMOS internally, and none of them are more recent that five or six years old in terms of the semiconductor logic. The price differences between one model and another make almost no difference in quality of the video. Install an obviously cheap-looking one, then it will be less attractive to thieves, but you can still point to it in an incident and say, "I have it all on camera." I tell my girls that, if they are ever in an accident, just rip the dash cam off the dash and put it in their pocket for later use.