johnzo

Yeah, my failure to exhaustively restate the crimes of the Kim family in my two-line evaluation of their regime on a football message board betrays my deep sympathies for the Juche principal and my admiration of Kim Il-Sung's original, brilliant and revolutionary contribution to national and international thought. You got me, champ. Anyway, bombing people into freedom has a super shitty track record over the last fifty years. Didn't work in Vietnam. Didn't work in Laos. Didn't work in Cambodia. Didn't work in Guatemala or Nicaragua. Isn't working in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or especially Syria. What's that old saw about doing the same thing over and over and hoping it'll work out differently?

You're hallucinating if you hear admiration in "the Kims are survivors who are good at playing a weak hand." It's a statement of fact. North Korea has very little going for them -- their land is **** for agriculture and doesn't have much in the way of oil or heavy industry either. Yet the Kims have somehow perpetuated their regime through famines and the utter collapse of one of their patron states. What of this is not true?

My take on the Kims is that they are survivors who are good at playing a weak hand. A North Korean nuclear attack on any non North-Korean target would be an extinction event for the Kim regime. The USA would pave the country with B61s. A conventional attack on Seoul and/or an invasion of South Korea would immediately result in hundreds or thousands of American casualties and simiilarly commit the USA to dismantling the Kim dynasty, though perhaps not as violently. A nork surprise attack has zero good endgames for the Kims. Exile in China would be the absolute best they could do. So why would they do it?

Oh, and lest anyone think the issue of North Korean refugees in Canada is purely rhetorical: https://news.vice.com/article/after-turning-hundreds-of-north-koreans-away-canada-now-vows-to-accept-its-refugees

Should Canada accept refugees from North Korea? I ask because it's strange that you are so anti-refugee and yet simultaneously so deeply concerned about human rights in North Korea. Let me know if I have this right: it's okay to spend billions bombing the people we're trying to save, but unthinkable to spend a few million housing them in the safety of North America?

There is substantial distance between "distancing themselves" and "consenting to a war with seven-figure casualties that will destabilize their backyard and create a refugee crisis." You think China is real eager to have another Syria on their southern border? How far do you think they'll go to prevent that from happening? Consider how the USA would respond if China bombed the **** out of Mexico and sent millions of refugees streaming into Arizona and Texas. The stakes are way different today than in the 1950s. In 1953 an armistice was tolerable to all sides because it preserved every government involved in the fighting. In 2017 any Korean military adventure would have to commit itself to the wholesale annihilation of the Kim regime. The outward nork stance of massive escalation means that tossing a few cruise missiles at a runway won't suffice. Have you looked at Korean geography? Do you know how hard it is to dislodge an enemy dug into mountains, especially one that's been digging in for decades? The Japanese made Iwo Jima into a bloody fortress in less than a year. The Nazis held an improvised defensive line in Northern Italy for a year against an Allied army that outnumbered them 3:1 in manpower and 10:1 in airpower. And how much luck did NATO have rooting the Taliban out of the Pakistani border regions? Even with their drones and B-52s and celebrated special forces, they could not manage it. There would be no quick and "clean" Saddam-style decapitation in Korea. Any Second Korean War would be an incalculable tragedy, even if China consented to it, and even if it was wholely contained to Korea. It's an easy thing to cheer for from the safety of Manitoba though.

Yeah, making unrestrained war on the client state of a nuclear-armed frenemy is a surprisingly tricky thing!

Why didn't the USA win a decisive victory last time they intervened in Korea? And how will this time be different?

It's very strange how the redblacks had a better QB and better Canadians than us in 2014 ... and yet the 2014 Bombers won twice as many games as the redblacks, including one head-to-head victory against the rbs. And strange how all but one of the expansion draft players had been cut by the time the redblacks won the Cup. (all but two if you count Pruneau as an expansion draft player, which he kinda does) (I was wrong about this ... there was more than one. Hopkins and Cappacotti at least.) Face it, the expansion draft was not a big deal. People like to get bent out of shape about it, going on like riderfans about how it was unfair and how the league was against us and how Desjardins was an ******* for throwing shade on our roster -- but nothing that Desjardins said was untrue. We were a dumpster fire after 2013. The rbs' ability to mold a bunch of free agents into a championship roster is the real story here. Most teams that sign a big posse of free agents like that don't meet expectations.

Even more impressive: Sinopoli made that yardage playing alongside ball sponges like Ellingson, Jackson, and Williams. He wasn't just a checkdown or a guy who keeps the wideside corner honest, he was a legit threat on a team with probably the best receiving corps since ... I dunno when. Be interesting to see how he does now that the redblacks receiving corps is diminished. Those guys opened up a lot of space for each other.

Yeah, i hear ya, drives me crazy when a guy misses 100% of the passes that aren't thrown to him...

Hard to know how terrible the bombers are at drafting without comparing their record to the rest of the league. The CFL draft is such a crapshoot.

News from my hometown: the Ontario gov't is piloting a basic minimum income program in Tbay (and also in Hamilton and Lindsay) http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/minimum-income-hugh-segal-ontario-budget-1.3740373 As automation kills more and more jobs (trucking and restaurants are up next) I think programs like this will become more and more necessary. Alas, the Ontario premier is about as popular as syphilis; her government certainly won't last long enough to see the results of the pilot.

#4 Parker #6 Ianuzzi #7 Sinopoli

Wow, that in a nutshell is your typical late-term Ottawa Rough Riders trade. Exchange your promising first round draft pick, a guy you can build around, for a great, but extremely high-mileage import DB. (To put it in more modern terms, it'd be like us trading Goosen or Chungh for Henry Burris in 2015.)

Great thread. This news is a year stale at this point, but here's another semi-recent mindblowing space thing: scientists using the Hubble have found GN-z11, the most distant thing we've ever observed. It's 32 billion light-years from Earth. When we look at it, we're seeing it as it was just 400 million years after the Big Bang. I know this is the way space and lightspeed work, but it's still freaky to me to think that observing distant objects is a form of time travel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GN-z11

That Argos boat logo is such a classic, way better than anything they've had since.

Holy ****. Is it a bluff? Is the Pyongyang motherfucker crazy enough to call it?

There's this strain of thinking in the USA, probably since Vietnam, maybe even Korea, that as a nation we don't fight dirty and seriously, we're too careful about ****. The people who think this way will get giant wood over dropping a huge bomb. It's a sign we're asserting ourselves and taking the gloves off. That's why they announce this ****.

New Mastodon. I can take or leave the song, but the video is fantastic. Love the final scene!

Neil McKinlay is a firefighter too. Was he the guy who was a part-time Lion on top of being a Vancouver firefighter? Also, former bomber Paul Clatney is a firefighter ... according to Wikipedia, dude has had a pretty awesome and varied career: he's been a CFL linebacker, a fireman, an Olympian, a minor-league hockey player, he even had a tryout with the Jays.

Last year they said that S.J. Green would not be ready for camp, he'd need a year of rehab. According to cfl.ca, he's on track to get into camp, though. Real happy to hear this, the league needs guys like SJG on the field. https://www.cfl.ca/2017/04/08/comeback-nearly-complete-injured-s-j-green/

Dunno what this means for the Esks, but I have to say that I prefered that the guy who held the rights to the Next Big QB also hated Chris Jones' guts. So this news is a mild bummer for me.

We played three games last year without Adams / Dressler / Smith. Mayo, not Denmark, was our most productive receiver in two of those games. With about 300 yards in just five games, he was on a 1,000-yard pace last year. Was a bummer to see him go.

This is not a Bomber problem. No team in the CFL is drafting really productive Canadian receivers these days. Check out this list of all the other receivers drafted in the top three rounds since 2013: Haidara, Adjei, Plant, Bailey, MacDonnell, Pierzchalski, Bastien, Demski, Harty, Durant, B. Jones, Smith, Brescacin, M. Jones, Blaszko Not a lot of production there. Durant put up 400 yards last year. Figure it takes a couple years for a CFL draftee to find their feet, we should be seeing receivers from the 2013..2015 classes start to make an impact, but for whatever reason, they're not. Sinopoli and Gore were the last consistently good Canadian receivers to come through the draft, and they were drafted back in 2010/2011. Sinopoli wasn't even drafted as a receiver, he was a QB when he arrived in Calgary and converted later.