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Everything posted by johnzo
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Meant to get back to this but spaced on it... I can't really talk about the rural parts of the PNW. When I get out of Seattle, I usually go to Portland or Vancouver or some other big city. Which is part of the problem facing the USA -- me and a hypothetical rural Trump voter are kinda like aliens to each other. That article is from 2015, before Oregon legalized recreational dope, which is going to change things some. I have heard that legal dope reduces rates of illicit drug abuse, diverts people away from the harder stuff, but don't quote me on that. Seattle itself has massive inequality -- we're more expensive than Vancouver now. We have lots of highly visible homeless people, on embankments, underpasses, in tent cities, begging at stoplights. Lots of them you'd consider non-traditionally homeless. It's easy to get pushed out of your rental, our tenant protection laws are pretty weak. The interesting thing is that there's a socialist backlash brewing, we have an explicitly socialist city council member (Kshama Sawant, who makes certain people very anxious .. her opponents are always very well funded by donations from across the country). I was just doorbelled by the president of the Tenant's Union, who is also running for council on an explicitly socialist platform. Last time I was in Winnipeg was summer 2014, during the Fringe festival. Didn't see as many homeless people as I was used to, but the weather was gorgeous and the Exchange District was full of young theater freaks so maybe they were there and I just didn't see them.
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Yeah, and the Lions are gonna roll out Chris Williams this year on top of Manny and Burnham. That is a scary set of receivers ... Jennings could pass for forty TDs next year. He can just score his way out of all the picks he'll throw. It'll be fun to watch if they're not playing the Bombers. (As of April, Williams' knee was on track to be ready for the regular season.)
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Yeah, there's something to this .... but the bill also represents a huge real actual victory. Obamacare -- both the medicaid expansion and the individual policy subsidies -- is largely financed by extra taxes on investment income. This bill rolls back a lot (if not all) of those taxes. Despite the name, its goal is not to increase access to health care, create better health outcomes, create a more efficient health care system, anything like that. It's just a tax cut.
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GET THE **** OUT OF MY CAB
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Great thread. I was a skinny kid, spent all my university years continuously playing hockey and football and biking to work. When I graduated and suddenly had a desk job and money and a live-in GF and moved away from all my sports friends, I got big. Currently 46yo, 6', 230ish lbs. I've had stretches where running got me down to 215 or so, but my knees are aging out of that. Swimming and lifting are both really boring to me, so I gotta find something. Maybe get into cycling hard again, tho Seattle is really bike hostile ... I've been doored and threatened a few times. Only thing I do now is yoga. I agree that yoga is great, if I skip it more than a couple seasons I feel myself seizing up like an old lawnmower engine. You can definitely find low-woo yoga if you look. I'd recommend going to a class--preferably a small one--so you've got someone minding your form. Iso posted a really great fitness story awhile ago, he turned around his health pretty dramatically.
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Around The League Off Season Discussion
johnzo replied to Bomber_fanaddict's topic in Blue Bomber Discussion
Vick is human garbage. Don't want him in the CFL unless he's cleaning up the stadium after the game. Would love to see the league pull a pre-emptive Justin Cox and just say "no, he's not welcome here, full stop, we won't register his contract, don't even bother thinking about it." -
I hate to tempt fate, but I gotta point out that Loffler has a bit of an injury history. Those smooth-striding legs have been rebuilt a few times.
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The anti-democratic right is a real thing in the USA. You've got your old school Christian Sharia dominionists ... national-level politicos like Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Mike Pence pussyfoot with those guys. Then you've got your new school neo-reactionaries like Moldbug, Peter Thiel and others. Bannon runs in Moldbug's circles too. Thiel lays it out pretty clearly in "Education of a Libertarian," you can google that if you want to know how a douchebag technocrat billionaire thinks society ought to run. The left-wing antidemocrats I've met are the familiar kind of jokey anarcho-socialists. The right wing ones have power and money and are way scarier.
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I'm trying to imagine how such a coup would work. The United States is a huge patchwork of political systems and local authorities. Any disruption at the federal level would result in local chaos and immediate state secession movements. Hundreds and thousands of people in authority would denounce such a move and any one of them could become the inspirational leader for a counter-coup movement. A lot of those people will be Republican senators and congressfolk who are suddenly sidelined by the executive. There is no possible way that Trump could decapitate his opposition quickly and decisively enough to smoothly take ultimate control. Speed really matters in a coup, it has to be concluded quickly or it fizzles (like we saw in Turkey last year) or becomes a civil war. The US military is vast and amazing, but is strictly forbidden by law to operate on US soil. Of course, a coup would be extralegal, but posse comitatus is baked pretty hard into the military. You could definitely not expect 100% cooperation from regular troops, many of whom are already deployed overseas, and all of whom take oaths to the Constitution, not to the president. Each state also has a national guard, so state governors have guns and troops too -- less sophisticated, but they are trained formations. Oftentimes these guys are under federal control, lots of them were deployed to Iraq. In a real bad civil war type situation, not sure how these guys line up. From a law enforcement standpoint ... as big as the US federal government is, to do any LE on a regional level, they need local cooperation -- this is why the sanctuary city thing is such a big deal, it's denying the federal government a lot of resources. So the localities most strongly opposed to Trump, where he would need boots on the ground, are already standing in opposition to him. Certainly lots of local cops are sympathetic to Trump -- he is popular with law enforcement largely because Sessions has indicated he's really not interested in prosecuting federal civil rights cases -- but their command-and-control are not sympathetic to him and any pro-Trump LE troops would need to self-organize. The Border Patrol is probably the best stormtrooper unit that Trump has to work with; they answer directly to the executive, they are largely unaccountable within the US border zone (100 miles from any border, including sea coasts) and they are skilled at mass incarceration. They're very sympathetic to Trump and operate everywhere that he is likely to face open resistance. There's just 20,000 of them, though, so they're not super huge compared to the size of the country. There'd be spontaneous militia units popping up all over, yahoos with trucks and guns. Dunno if they could evolve a command-and-control structure that would make them useful for anything other than random terrorization. I think the more feasible scenario is a Hitler / Mussolini / Palpatine deal: the federal legislators vote themselves out of a job and hand ultimate power to the administration, and the supreme court signs off on it. This doesn't feel feasible at all. The Trump personality cult is pretty shallow, the guy can't even staff his own White House with loyal people, and DC is full of powerful and venal shits who will start kicking unless their nest is well-feathered. So I'm not super worried about this, there's lots of damage Trump can do without dismantling constitutional government wholesale. The worst thing he can do here, I think, is de-legitimize the rule of law enough so that more people start pining for a real baller dictator, one with the charisma to motivate a really broad base of support across the military, political, media, and religious worlds. Trump doesn't seem up to that.
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There's also the case where North Korea is trafficking its nuclear warheads to terrorists. I don't worry about missiles*, I worry about a freighter sailing into Seattle or Vancouver with a nuke in one of its cargo containers. However, there's tons of forensics that scientists can do on nuclear blasts. The origin of a bomb exploding on North American soil would be known very quickly. If it was a DPRK bomb, North Korea would be annihilated shortly afterwards. Hell, even if it wasn't a DPRK bomb, we might pave North Korea anyway. Americans are opportunistic warmakers. So young Kim and his government are very strongly incented to keep their bombs at home. All that changes if the Kim regime faces an existential threat. If the DPRK government is against the wall and has nothing to lose, they might as well give their bomb tech away. This is yet another reason why a preemptive attack on the DPRK is a bad idea: it incents them to do the most dangerous thing they can do to us. But ... if intelligence reveals that the Kims are indeed passing bombs, bomb components, or bomb tech to ISIL ... that, to me, would justify a full-scale regime change war. Trouble is, there's absolutely no way I trust that the US government will get that appraisal right, not after seeing how it **** the bed in 2003. -- * Why I don't worry about missiles: foreign missiles are super hard to reverse engineer, and no country that owns ICBMs will sell the DPRK one anyway. They're trying to develop their own indigenous designs, but long-range missiles require a lot of tests to shake down. Those tests are extremely expensive and impossible to keep secret, so we know that the DPRK doesn't test their missiles with nearly the frequency necessary to make them reliable and accurate, especially at intercontinental ranges, especially because re-entry is a tricky problem to solve. Most of their current designs are liquid-fueled and truck mounted and need hours-long fueling cycles to fly; their flagship Taepodong-2 missile needs both a long fueling cycle and a static launchpad to fly. The USA has all kinds of reconnaissance assets watching those sites and are deploying missile defense systems to the Pacific. So you've got missiles that are slow to fire, badly tested, inaccurate, with lots of countermeasures in the theater, and then somehow if everything goes right the DPRK wins a battle and kills a city ... but loses the very very short war to follow. The DPRK navy has a new class of indigenous submarine under construction, one that may have SLBM capabilities, but I'm not worried about that either. Missiles are hard, submarines are hard, missiles + submarines are super hard. SLBM launch tests will be impossible to keep secret. We'll be well aware of the progress they make there.
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Around The League Off Season Discussion
johnzo replied to Bomber_fanaddict's topic in Blue Bomber Discussion
Yeah, why not take a few months to get in Rory Kohlert's ear about how he liked playing for a 3-15 team that gonged everyone but Marcel Bellefeuille at the end of the season? Doesn't seem like a bad move, if you're forced to make a pick anyway. -
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?
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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?
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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?
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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
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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?
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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.
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Yeah, making unrestrained war on the client state of a nuclear-armed frenemy is a surprisingly tricky thing!
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Why didn't the USA win a decisive victory last time they intervened in Korea? And how will this time be different?
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Around The League Off Season Discussion
johnzo replied to Bomber_fanaddict's topic in Blue Bomber Discussion
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.
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Yeah, i hear ya, drives me crazy when a guy misses 100% of the passes that aren't thrown to him...
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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.
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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.
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#4 Parker #6 Ianuzzi #7 Sinopoli