lostfan

John Danks came through for us last year with the s***-talking, then he backed it up on the mound.

I really don't care if I change my mind or not. If I do, I do. I talk about what I want to talk about and when I get tired of it I stop.

Cubs fans' favorite talking point is how Sox fans are all violent white trash and they love to bring up the Ligue incident. They love to ignore that they do things like this JUST as often, it doesn't get publicized.

I don't usually listen to Hawk's ramblings, and I tend to favor Ozzie-bashers in these cases, but I think I'm going to take Ozzie's side on this one. It really looks like Black Jack overreacted.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 14, 2009 -> 05:24 PM) I was skeptical until I saw that graph. The only way that graph actually would realistically happen is if they took all the ballots, shipped them to a central location, and then totally randomized them before counting them. That chart doesn't really appear to be of much significance by itself, apparently you can simulate US presidential elections and have a similar straight line graph.

The Internet is like an interactive echo chamber. Actual intellectual debate that doesn't involve insulting people is rare to the point of being unheard of in certain places. People just go where they want to go to see what they want to see, and they don't let people challenge them. Example: I could go sign up right now for a right-wing message board and try to jump into a thread about Obama's birth certificate. I could tell the honest truth in a respectful way, i.e. Obama's birth certificate does exist and this has been confirmed by the hospital, but it's not being released because of various health privacy laws and they can't release it without Obama himself requesting it (calling attention to the fact that Obama frankly is ignoring their demands). I would get shouted down and run off the site, although it doesn't help matters that the only people that ever do things like that are trolls. The end result is you have all these people feeding into each other who really believe Obama is some secret stealth operative who is a non-US citizen, and they get released onto the rest of the internet to ramble incessantly about dumb s***. Often, you can tell where someone gets spoon-fed their information just by the words and phrases they use.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 14, 2009 -> 05:29 PM) While this is true, it's worth noting what position Khamenei had during Khomenei's stint as Ayatollah: President. It's also worth noting that the last time there was a change, the leadership appears to have stayed in a state of turmoil for years due to the fact that he wasn't actually a religious cleric at the time he was appointed, although Khamenei seems to have been de facto selected by his predecessor. I haven't a clue what sort of succession ideas this one has. If he's willing to rig an election for Ahmadeinejad, then he could well want him in line. Interesting, I didn't know that. I figured Khomeini more or less hand-selected Khameini.

QUOTE (Chet Kincaid @ Jun 14, 2009 -> 04:15 PM) If Wise is DFAed then Getz should be right behind him out of the door. I may be a little late to posting this, but... sigh.

Either yesterday or the day before, I was talking to a mutual friend, she asked me if I knew about the pregnancy. Both of us ended up b****ing about how she was getting on our nerves and we both had been trying to bite our tongues. This friend actually told her on the 2nd pregnancy/abortion to stop complaining about it all the time because it sounded like she secretly wanted to have a child. Friend #1 (the stupid one) got mad at friend #2 (the mutual friend) for saying that when she was really 100% correct. Whatever. Her life, her decisions. I always try to change the subject when she brings up her unwanted pregnancies. I told her to use birth control but she said it makes her blood pressure go up, then she tried to blame it on her boyfriend "because he always skips putting on the condom." lol, whatever. A box of condoms is 10 bucks, an abortion is 300...

QUOTE (Texsox @ Jun 14, 2009 -> 08:37 AM) Just like you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, he is not free to say anything. We do place reasonable limits on speech in this country. We also adjust them to the forum this person has. As I mentioned earlier, intelligent, moral, people have found themselves on both sides of this debate. I believe life should triumph over death. To the best of medical knowledge, every fetus that has been carried to full term becomes a human, not a puppy, amoeba, or a coffee bean. Medically, when the fetus is threatened, it is considered a patient, not a wart, tumor, or fingernail. While it is a hard decision, and I have a great deal of empathy for women in this debate, abortion is wrong in my eyes. When it is used as emergency contraception, it is about the saddest thing I can contemplate. See my post I made later, after that. I have a friend who's on I think her 4th (or maybe it's 5th, I lost count) pregnancy who really gets on my f***ing nerves. She got pregnant the first time making bad decisions, pretty much by having unprotected sex etc. She went and got an abortion because she was in school at the time and wouldn't have been able to handle a child in her life... fine. Then the very next month (her next ovulation cycle) she gets pregnant AGAIN so she has to get another one. That one I really had to bite my tongue for because it suggested she learned absolutely nothing and didn't change her behavior. She went and got this one but she didn't have enough money to pay for anesthesia, so I had to hear her complain about how terrible it was. A couple of months later she got pregnant again and went ahead and had this baby, which is about 7 months now. Right now she's pregnant again (with the same guy, who by the way isn't much of a father), and calling me up to tell me how stressed out she is and she's having another abortion. They need to give her her abortion, but give her a hysterectomy at the same time since she obviously doesn't want kids, but wants the freedom to have sex without using contraceptives or birth control.

QUOTE (kyyle23 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 11:27 PM) If the Ayatollah were to pass away tomorrow, would there be someone to usurp his power, or would Ahmadinejad then truly have all of the power in the country. A (unelected) religious figure would take over. This Ayatollah took over from the first one I think in the late 80s.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 11:04 PM) One possibility is that this is actually deliberate...draw Mousavi's supporters out in to the streets where they're vulnerable. Nah, I'd just chalk this up to incompetence and shortsightedness. I really doubt they had a real plan. As an analyst I try not to see things with a pro-Western/US bias (i.e., automatically figuring someone I don't like had to cheat to win) but in this case what happened is pretty obvious.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 10:56 PM) This is the best data I've seen since the correlation between global warming and number of pirates. lol, seriously that is just really f***ing lazy.

I really doubt anything happens, this isn't the first time there's been civil unrest in Iran. But if anything this will probably accelerate the end of the Islamic regime there by a few more years - there's a s***-ton of under-30s in Iran, and this generation doesn't remember 1979 or American meddling in Iranian affairs. It's only a matter of time really. But goddamn, what amateurs. They couldn't even be bothered to make the voting across provinces even look real. Could you imagine if Obama won Texas and Oklahoma by large margins, or if McCain had gotten a 65% margin in San Francisco and Chicago? That would send up red flags immediately.

No way that Ahmadinejad won Tehran at all, let alone by a landslide.

QUOTE (joesaiditstrue @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 06:40 PM) Linebrink is a god damned clown, leadoff walk. Nice going there. 7 run lead, let's nibble. Seriously, do you mind?

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 05:35 PM) 1) Corrected that for ya 2) Once again, it goes to show my belief that the more we mess with the middle east, the more we make it worse. lol. oops

QUOTE (knightni @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 05:06 PM) The dictatorship brought on revolution in the form of radical religious fundamentalism. That's the cliff's notes cliff's notes version.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 05:01 PM) I'm not really up to snuff on Iranian history. I suppose i should in a hurry now. lol Cliff's notes: Iran was once a pro-Western democracy that had a lot of British influence, like the rest of the Middle East, along with Pakistan and India. Then their (elected) leader - I believe his name was Mossadeq off the top of my head - made the decision to nationalize Iranian oil so that they could keep the oil revenue for themselves. This pissed the British off because it was private British companies profiting off that oil, and they stood to lose a lot of money. They wanted to overthrow the government to keep the profits, so they tried to play the "Communist" card with Truman (claiming that the Iranian government was vulnerable to a takeover by the Soviets, so we better do it first, of course this was bulls***, they just wated their money). Truman didn't buy it, so the Brits tried it again when President Eisenhower got elected. Eisenhower, really not knowing any better, bought it and authorized Operation Ajax which basically installed a dictator who let the Brits keep their oil. He was pro-US though so we didn't care and didn't bother to think of the consequences. The Iranian people knew the score though and it really pissed them off, because the shah was extremely brutal. Eventually President Carter convinced the shah to loosen his grip on the Iranians some since it looked like his house of cards was about to implode on him, and the shah did, but that led to the collapse of his government (it was imminent) and made him have to flee the country. For a while it looked like some students and intellectual types were about to take over the government, but the last straw was when we allowed the shah to be treated here in the US for cancer. Their response was the embassy takeover and hostage crisis along with the conservative, hard-core anti-US Islamic regime we have now. The whole thing just sucks, because prior to that, Iran idolized the US and wanted to be a secular democracy just like us. And had we not made that series of mistakes, they probably would be.

QUOTE (Thunderbolt @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 05:03 PM) It depends. Are their honey's at this party? Yeah I would have to give the edge to BA in that case, Orton's married now.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jun 13, 2009 -> 04:52 PM) It will be a long, bloody uphill fight. When you have, basically, a dictatorish regime with complete control of all media and armed forces, good luck! It already happened once, 30 years ago... just saying

I saw in one of those videos that Balta posted, he has some pretty ridiculous bat speed.

I doubt it comes to a civil war, but we were talking about that at work. A co-worker said that if Ahmadinejad "won" she thought there would be a revolution. I don't see it though but then again I don't really study Iran that closely either.

Also now that I think of it, we don't need to be telling Iran how to rig elections, I forgot they already caught us with our hand in the cookie jar before.

Pods has been a decent situational hitter this year, let's see what he can do.