Rov_Scam
3d ago
I know this is the NFL thread, but it seems like a good place as any to discuss college football as well, as discussions I had at a tailgate party over the weekend have had me thinking about how incredibly goofy the college football landscape has become over the past several years, and what the future may hold.
Part I: Project Rudy
Last week, an article at Yahoo Sports revealed that a group of former Disney executives who now run a private equity firm called Smash Capital have been shopping a proposal to college ADs over the past several months. They propose to form a 70 team super-league. While they don't have any particular teams in mind, the assumption is that the league would include all the current Power 4 teams, plus independent Notre Dame and the Pac-12 rump of Oregon State and Washington State. The league would keep current conferene alignments intact (presumably to avoid conference pushback by preserving the phony baloney jobs of the commissioners) but would negotiate a league-wide grant of media rights that would see teams paid based on 3 tiers. They assume that the first tier of the top 16 teams would get something like double what the Big 10 and SEC are currently getting, the second tier of 22 teams would get about what the Big Ten and SEC are currently getting, and the remaining teams would get something comparable to what the ACC and Big 12 are currently getting. G5/FCS games would be eliminated and replaced with marquee matchups of the top teams that would partially drive the increased revenue, and the backers are supposedly putting up 5.4 billion. There's also supposedly an expanded playoff format as well, but the whole presentation hasn't leaked and details are sparse.
This is one of those proposals that looks good on the surface until you start thinking about it and looking closely at the details. It hits some of the high notes of what college football fans want: Conference stability, promotion/relegation, more playoffs, not playing 3 creampuffs a year, etc. The schools should be salivating at the potential to double their revenue. But there's no way in hell that this pans out, and the effect on fans of schools that aren't blue-bloods isn't clear. First, there's the possibility of an antitrust violation, but that's the least of my concerns. The bigger problem is that schools that can't compete won't necessarily make more money. If your team is in the ACC or Big 12, this is neutral at worst, but if you're a fan of a bottom-tier Big 10 or ACC team, a pay cut is almost certain. If Purdue goes 3–9 now, they still get the same national TV money as Ohio State. Under the proposal, they'd be making less than they are now, and Ohio State would be making significantly more. Furthermore, if a marquee team has a bad year, they aren't going to be happy taking less money. Part of the perversity of college sports is that bad teams often have better ratings (and thus drive more revenue) than good teams. Florida is not going to be happy making Big 12 money just because their record dictates that they do.
The plan, of course, anticipates this, and puts two safeguards in place. The first, dumber, proposal is that 8 teams with huge revenue streams would become "permanent" members of the top tier, and would always get the big bucks. This fails for the simple reason that there are more than 8 teams that think they deserve this distinction. If you make the permanent members Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, Texas, USC, Clemson, Georgia, and LSU, it seems okay at first glance. But there's no way Penn State accepts this arrangement. Neither does Florida, or Nebraska, or Oregon. Texas A&M won't, and Oklahoma won't either. And don't get me started on Florida State. The second guardrail, which is more reasonable in one sense and stupider in another, is that promotion/relegation decisions won't be made based on any kind of statistical formula, but on an opaque process determined by some sort of committee. In fact, I can't find anything to indicate that the "top teams" will even be determined by record and not simply based on how valuable the committee feels they are to the brand. If Baylor wins the national title, one can imagine them still being considered Tier 2 due to lack of sustained national interest, not to mention if Northwestern manages to finish at 16 after a good season where they don't actually win anything.
So you already have a system where there isn't any incentive for any individual school to buy in, other than the possibility of the absolute top-tier doubling their incomes. But even if you do get buy-in from everybody, it still doesn't solve the entire problem. The 5.4 billion that Smash Capital is putting up? Well, that's borrowed from future revenues. the idea is that there's a three year transition period, and the money will be paid back when the new league negotiates a new media deal. This isn't entirely unprecedented; schools that change conferences often forgo a full share for the first several years in exchange for interest-free loans that are paid back in future years. This is supposed to ease the burden of dilution on existing schools while giving the new entrants ready cash. The difference is that the amounts involved are relatively small compared to the total revenues, and are based on what the conference is already making. And it only applies to one or two teams in the conference. 5.4 billion needing to be paid out of revenues, presumably with interest, requires some serious revenue increases. By comparison, the power conferences plus Notre Dame currently gross about 2.7 billion in TV money related exclusively to football. revenues would probably have to increase by at least 30% just for them to tread water once the payoff period begins, let alone for them to get the eye-watering increases that are promised. And if the revenues aren't there, who ends up holding the bag? It's not going to be Smash Capital. This proposal is nothing but hot air.
Part II: Insert Joke About Billable Hours Here
Late last year, the Atlantic Coast Conference, anticipating litigation, preemptively filed suit against Florida State in North Carolina. Florida State quickly filed their own suit against the ACC in Florida. Last February, Clemson, who had initially said they weren't pursuing litigation, filed a similar but slightly different suit against the ACC in South Carolina, and the ACC filed their own suit against Clemson in North Carolina the next day. At issue here are conference exit fees and grant of rights agreements.
In 2004, the ACC raided the Big East, perceived to be the weakest major conference, by poaching Miami, Virginia Tech, and Boston College, the first two of which were perceived to be the strongest programs. The Big East responded by raiding the mid-major Conference USA, and was able to limp along for a few more years, until the ACC came calling again in 2011. The departures of Pitt and Syracuse effectively killed the conference, and West Virginia soon jumped ship to the Big 12. Inspired by this new alignment, the Big 10 poached Maryland from the ACC. Maryland wasn't a strong program, but at the time, media deals involving the nascent Big Ten Network made weak programs in big markets particularly lucrative. The ACC responded by increasing its exit fee to be so large that no school would dare leave. When it renegotiated its broadcast rights with ESPN in 2016, the member schools agreed to grant their media rights to the ACC through the end of the deal, which was soon extended to 2036.
In 2020, the Big Ten and SEC signed lucrative media deals that would pay their members double what ESPN was paying the ACC. Florida State and Clemson, who envision themselves as among college football's elite, were no longer happy with their lot. The ACC money had always been lower, but it wasn't that much lower. Additionally, both of those leagues had since started expanding at a breakneck pace, gobbling up any team that would add value. Surely, another conference would be willing to offer Clemson a better deal than they were currently getting. Surely, Miami and North Carolina thought the same thing, but were biding their time. Florida State, however, made no bones about their wanting out, and the situation was exacerbated when the Playoff committee snubbed an undefeated Seminoles team in favor of an Alabama team with a loss.
The stumbling block, however, is that the current exit fees and grant of rights would make leaving financially ruinous. Exit fees have been around for a while, but they aren't necessarily enforceable. There's a principle in contract law that says that damages have to be proportionate to the actual loss. In some cases the law allows the contracting parties to agree on damages in advance, but courts will only enforce these clauses to the extent that they're a reasonable attemt to estimate damages that would be difficult to prove in the event of breach. Courts will not enforce them to the extent that they are meant to penalize the breaching party. The result of past conference raids was that the remaining members would sue whoever was leaving to collect the exit fee and they'd eventually negotiate a settlement. the Grant of Rights is an entirely different animal, though. Instead of a naked attempt at getting damages for breach, it's essentially no different than an agreement granting a copyright or patent license. If the ACC owns the broadcast rights, then it doesn't matter where Florida St. plays, they get the money from it, and since Florida St. wouldn't be in the conference, they wouldn't get a share of it. How this would actually play out in real life is anyone's guess, and I don't know enough about this kind of thing to make any predictions about what the court would do, but suffice it to say that the cost of Florida St. leaving is estimated to be between 200 and 500 million, and they're suing for declaratory judgment that the exit fee and grant of rights provisions are unenforceable.
As I mentioned above, I'm less interested in the legal details than I am of the overall consequences of these lawsuits. There are two interesting wrinkles. The first is that there's also a fifth lawsuit that was filed by the Florida Attorney General that seeks to make to contents of the ESPN deal public. It came out in litigation that the schools don't actually have their own copies of this agreement due to a confidentiality clause, and the only way they can see it is through personal inspection at ACC headquarters. The more interesting aspect is that it also came out that the ESPN deal doesn't definitively extend until 2036, as was originally thought, but that ESPN has a unilateral option to extend the deal until that date, and that they must make that election by February 2025. If Florida State's suit is successful, there is widespread consensus that it could mean the end of the ACC. It's not so much that the league wouldn't survive without them, but that the absence of any financial penalty would instigate a mass exodus of the stronger teams, leaving the weaker ones holding the bag.
This puts ESPN in an interesting situation. All other things being equal, an freshly-negotiated ACC deal is likely to be worth significantly more than the current deal, so in a normal world, it would be a no-brainer for ESPN to exercise their option. But the litigation changes things. If Florida St. is successful, and the predicted exodus were to occur, the contract would be worthless. And with the other conferences locked into their deals until 2030, it may be to ESPN's benefit to blow the whole thing up. When the ACC's current deal expires in 2026, they'll be in the same position the Pac-12 was last spring. With no TV deal, there's no grant of rights to worry about, and the biggest barrier keeping teams in is removed. To be clear, most ACC members want the conference to survive. The problem is that no one wants to be left without a seat when the music stops, so everyone is behooved to jockey for position early.
At least that was the theory until late last week, when yet another wrinkle emerged in this mysterious deal: It's not a full option like it had been reported. It's actually a complicated situation, the details of which I won't bore you with, but the consensus now is that ESPN is expected to pick up the option because not doing so would put them in a weird situation where they could be subsidizing a television network without any teams, but that's another story entirely. Another wrinkle in this is that it's not entirely clear that Florida St., or anyone else, would even get an invitation to join the SEC or Big Ten even if they could get out of the ACC. Florida St. fans seem to think they'll waltz right into the Big Ten, but that's far from certain. The current Big Ten deal, which runs through 2030, doesn't make any accommodation for expansion. Any increased revenue a new member could provide wouldn't be realized until after that date, and existing members will be reluctant to share too much of the current pie. When the Big Ten added Oregon and Washington at the last minute following the Pac-12's imminent demise, both teams were forced to accept shares far less than the other members, shares that aren't any more than what they had been getting in the Pac-12. Oregon doesn't have to worry about this, with Phil Knight willing to pony up whatever they need, but, aside from some semblance of stability, Washington isn't going to benefit for a while.
Note that that's only a semblance of stability. One possibility is that the new so-called Power 2 renegotiate even larger deals come 2030 that will be enough to feed everybody. The other, and the one some think is inevitable, is that the bigger teams cut the dead weight and form a super conference. If Florida St. isn't content to subsidize Wake Forest and Georgia Tech, then why would they be content to subsidize Illinois and Rutgers? While the dedicated network deals are still lucrative, cord-cutting, and the willingness of networks to pay eye-watering sums for premiere matchups, mean that they aren't the primary drivers of revenue that they once were. Sure, Maryland may get you higher carriage fees in the Baltimore and DC markets, but those pale in comparison to how much you're paying them from a national deal that they don't make much more attractive. One suspects that once the TV deals are up in 2030, the big schools will cut the remnants of the Big Ten and SEC loose and form that new super league, freed of NCAA restrictions and of the Mizzous and Purdues of the world. These schools have no exit fees or grants of rights, because there's no threat of leaving. Until, at least, the blue bloods start talking among themselves about how much money they could be making, and people start getting ideas. Thus is the real reason why Florida St. and Clemson want out. If there's going to be a super league, they don't want their ACC commitment to get in the way, and if it means making less money for a few years, then so be it.
Part III: Burning Down the House to Kill the Cockroaches
I want to shift the talk away from realignment and towards the other big changes that college football has seen the past few years, namely, player payments and the transfer portal. Just to be clear, it used to be against the rules for schools to pay players. In fact, it used to be against the rules for anyone to pay players, to the point that even part-time employment was considered suspect (after all, what does one think when a big donor pays a top recruit a ton of money to ostensibly work at his car dealership one hour per week?) The rule also used to be that if an athlete transferred schools, it came at the cost of a year of eligibility. Transfers still happened, but only if the situation was dire. First, the court ruled that the NCAA couldn't prohibit athletes from monetizing their name, image, or likeness, leading to so-called NIL deals. These deals were ostensibly for promotional purposes, like endorsements, but in reality most of them don't require the recipient to do anything other than play sports. Then, courts ruled that the NCAA couldn't put any prohibitions on transfers, especially since these could prevent them from getting NIL money (in practice, the NCAA had already loosened transfer restrictions). Finally, courts cleared the way for schools to make direct payments to student athletes.
A few years ago, coaches from big schools would recruit student athletes with promises of playing for huge crowds, of playing on TV, or of having a decent chance of getting to the NFL. Coaches from smaller schools would point out that their environment was less competitive and they were thus more likely to get playing time. But if a lesser program managed to snag a gem, they had a chance of making a run for it. Now, schools have to contend with the additional factor of how much money they can get, and they have to contend with this every year. They no longer recruit high school kids but people who are already on the team. After all, if another school is offering better money, there's nothing to stop them from transferring. At first it was thought that lesser schools might benefit from the transfer portal because good players who couldn't get playing time at big schools would be able to transfer more easily. The result, though, was that playing time became less of an inducement to go to smaller schools in the first place. After all, every kid who is offered a scholarship at a top program thinks he can be the starter. Under the old system, he maybe could have been reasoned with. Now, there's no reason not to go to Alabama. Take your shot at the starting job. If you get it, great. If you get benched, transfer. It's a totally different landscape.
While I may bemoan these changes, I really can't argue with them. Jurists from both sides of the aisle concede that the system that was in place for college sports throughout most of its history is ridiculous in any other context, and antitrust law prohibits it. A conservative would bemoan the changes and try to reverse them, or at least limit them. But that's just delaying the inevitable, and probably not by very long. My solution is to accelerate them; blow up the system so violently and completely that whatever remaining shreds of credibility are destroyed. Do something so radical that even the fans of the biggest programs will turn up their noses in disgust. Something that goes beyond what donor money and NIL deals and the transfer portal can accomplish. We need to destroy the last vestiges of NCAA eligibility requirements, and the path is clear.
The recent changes were driven by antitrust law. An athlete sues the NCAA for unreasonably restraining trade, the court agrees (because NCAA restrictions look ridiculous if applied to ordinary businesses), and block in the Jenga tower comes out. But most of these are simply taking them off the top, I want to go after the piece that holds up the whole tower: Time restrictions. Current NCAA rules are complicated but effectively limit players to 4 years of eligibility, and they must be used before your 28th birthday. Of course, there are exceptions for redshirt and COVID years, but the idea is that you get 4 years, and then you're done. If an entire industry had rules limiting how long employees could work there, and there wasn't some seriously good public policy interest at stake, it's unlikely a court would allow this. After all, they're preventing perfectly willing employees from working for companies that want to hire them for entirely arbitrary reasons. There's no conceivable reason that the same shouldn't apply to college football. Players who graduate can already play, provided they're enrolled at the university. If a player graduates after 4 years on the team and still wants to play, why shouldn't he be able to? This makes increasing sense in the world of NIL money, where you're unreasonably restricting his ability to earn a living due to arbitrary criteria. This was basically the same argument in the transfer case brought by the New York AG—the kid wants to transfer because he can make more money, and your arbitrary rules tell him he can't do that.
The effect of this would be dramatic. Most athletes don't peak until their late-20s, but only a few college athletes have any eligibility left by this point. There are plenty of guys out there who could make a college roster if they were only allowed to. And with the money involved, there are plenty of guys in the CFL and whatever the USFL is called now who would do better to stay in college. Once this rule is eliminated, these guys will just enroll in some class at the school where they can get the most money and continue their careers. The top levels of college ball will be dominated by these guys, since they exponentially increase your chances of winning. the practice of signing 30-year-olds who graduated years ago will be mocked at first, but any college team that's serious about winning championships won't have a choice. Pretty soon the 18 to 22-year-olds who dominate the game now will be slowly phased out.
This will have a downstream effect of ruining the NFL as well, because the 21 and 22-year-olds they're used to drafting simply won't have enough playing time to get a good read on. The only draftable players will be in their mid-20s, and guys will be on rookie deals into their 30s. I hate to see this happen and I hope the effect isn't too severe, but it's an inevitable consequence. The endgame here is that the increased ridiculousness of college football effectively becoming a b-league is that the traditional college players, who aren't getting playing time, form a union and strike a deal with whomever the powers that be are. Once a collective bargaining agreement is in place, antitrust rules no longer apply, and some of the provisions that are currently being struck down are implemented again, and maybe new restrictions are imposed that at least recognize that it's a professional league and that if we want to maintain the illusion of amateurism and parity then they need to do some things that were previously unthinkable. I don't know what it will look like, but I think it's inevitable that some kind of breaking point is reached where the product becomes so disgusting that it's forced to change.
Part IV: Conclusion
The last section may seem a bit ridiculous, but it it underscores a point: Nothing is sacred. Not to the courts, and certainly not to anyone who stands to profit. The NCAA is a more or less defunct entity at this point; I don't know how any of their current regulations are defensible under the way the laws have recently been interpreted. I also want to make a larger point, and one that it seems most college football fans don't understand: No changes will be made that cost the big schools money. This would seem so obvious as to be tautological, but it seems like most college football fans haven't figured this out. The internet is full of various proposals to "fix" college football by realigning conferences to more traditional alignments, improving revenue parity, imposing top-down organization, imposing NIL restrictions, or any number of other things. But none of these things improve revenue, so they won't happen. That's one thing about Project Rudy that actually makes sense, even if the rest of it doesn't. It doesn't present itself as anything other than a revenue generator. It doesn't eliminate creampuffs because they're idiotic schedule padding, but because better games are more attractive to TV networks (ironically, they fail to understand that this benefit probably isn't outweighed by the fact that the big schools would lose a home game or two, but TV guys can be myopic). It's main selling point is that it's lucrative. And, for better or worse, that's what we have to deal with.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
No, pickleball is for high school kids and senior citizens. It's a considerably less yuppie version of tennis, in that it's cheaper and involves less skill.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Not AI, and not upscaling. Whenever we look at something in real time, what we can see is limited by how much light can get to our retinas and hence to our brains. We can control this a little bit, through dilation of pupils, but the effect is limited. Similarly, we can't make our brains more light-sensitive than they already are, as we're optimized for normal daytime viewing. A camera doesn't have this limitation. SLRs can use aperture and shutter speed to make things more or less visible than they are in the real world, but phones aren't sophisticated enough for this. What phones (and SLRs as well) can do is make the digital sensor more sensitive by cranking up the ISO settings. Most photographers try to shoot with low ISO settings because cranking these will result in digital noise, but people shooting with their phones aren't this picky. If you're shooting at night, most automatic settings will crank the ISO to something most amateur photographers would consider ungodly. While this does have some effect on image quality, it also means that the camera can see more than your eyes can. The same effect could be achieved on color film by taking a long exposure, though this may cause star trails or other (potentially) unwanted artifacts. Most (all?) of those cool space photos of nebulae and other deep field objects aren't anything you'd be able to see with the naked eye, but are achieved by letting a lot of light in, using software to stack photos, and other camera tricks. This isn't to say that you're being lied to by "enhancements"; everything you're seeing is actually there, our visual systems just aren't equipped to see it in real time.
Rov_Scam
6d ago
Pierogies may be the signature food, but it's not something you can really order in a restaurant. The only place I can think of that had them was the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern, but that place closed a few years ago. I think Gooski's has them too, but that's more of a bar and not the kind of place I'd recommend someone goes expecting dinner. Pierogies are something your grandma makes on Fridays during Lent.
May I ask how the hell you ended up in a pizza shop on a 4 lane highway in an interstitial zone between two unglamourous neighborhoods in the least touristy part of town? I've never been there but it's well-regarded, so I have to give you credit. Honestly, the only "signature" food we have that you can easily getis Pirmanti's, but that just seems like cheating. Honestly, I'm not much of a restaurant guy, but if you want that true grandma's basement Pittsburgh charm then Big Jim's in The Run is what you're looking for, though it doesn't have quite the same appeal since Guy Fieri went there. If you're looking for breakfast the typical tourist choice is Pamela's in the Strip, which is fine, but I'd recommend Johnny's in the West End since you obviously have a car, and there's no way you'd find this place on your own since it's on a road off of a highway onramp behind an industrial piping contractor. And if you're in the whole Brookline/Dormont area, be aware that almost every bar on West Liberty Ave. is an actual dive bar that has no appeal to people who think that dive bars have craft beer. Slap Shot's, Jamo's, the Apple Inn, Albert's, etc. are all filled with cigarette smoke and degenerates. I was once in the Brookline Pub a number of years back and the Sheriff showed up and dragged out half the customers on warrants.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
So, I guess you'll be voting for Harris then? That's the only reasonable conclusion I can draw based on the timeline here. The protests happened in 2017, and the decision to drop the charges came in 2018. That's well into the Trump presidency and well into Jessie Lieu's tenure as US Attorney for Washington DC. If Trump had a problem with these non-prosecutions it was well within his power to put pressure on the US Attorney's office or fire Lieu if she didn't comply, but there's no indication he did either. Instead, he tried to get Lieu promoted! You can say the same thing about January 6. Sure, Trump wants to pardon them now, but he could have done a great deal to prevent the prosecutions if he'd actually acted before he left office. While he was warned of the unclear legal ground a blanket pardon would stand on, it would have made prosecutions a hell of a lot more difficult. And 30 of the perpetrators had been arrested by the time his term expired, including most of the prominent ones. Seeing all those guys walking free and the rest having defenses that would take a Supreme Court decision to resolve would have at least delayed proceedings long enough to dampen the Biden Administration's enthusiasm for pursuing the charges. But, of course, he didn't, and here we are.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
So instead of trying to verbally convince me that the economy isn't actually that bad, why don't we instead come up with a plan of action to make my burger not cost $30 anymore? Is there anyone in November running on a platform of making burgers not cost as much? Because I'll vote for that guy.
Well, I wasn't planning on getting involved in politics, but if that's what you're concerned about, I have a plan that all but guarantees to get the cost of that hamburger down: First, we'll raise interest rates up to Volcker-era levels. If this managed to get inflation down by double digits, with inflation currently sitting at 2.5%, it should be enough to get double-digit deflation. Next, I'm going to raise taxes on practically everyone. Current middle class brackets are in the 21%–24% bracket, let's get them into the 25%-30% range they were at before the Reagan tax cuts. Next, we'll get rid of all tariffs. There's no reason for Five Guys to be forced to pay extra if they can get cheaper beef from Brazil. Finally, end all immigration restrictions. Farmers, food processing plants, and restaurants shouldn't have to pay anyone $15/hr when there are plenty of people who would work for the minimum wage and be glad to get it. Now, there's a decent chance that you might not have a job after my plan takes effect, rendering the cost of restaurant food a moot point, but that would do it.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Voter turnout was up significantly in 2020 compared to any presidential election since at least 1992. This was true in every state, with most states seeing around a 6 point bump. It didn't even seem to matter if the state was competitive or not in the presidential election; Hawaii, which usually sees a turnout in the 30s or low 40s, jumped from around 38 percent turnout to around 52 percent turnout. Texas, the new loser, saw turnout increase from 43.4% to 51.3%. California and Montana both saw ten point increases. For whatever reason, Americans, regardless of political disposition, were more inclined to vote in 2020 than they were in previous years. If this, in and of itself, is evidence of fraud in swing states, then it's evidence of fraud in every state, including ones controlled by Republicans that voted for Trump in larger margins than in 2016.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Because there is a massive, massive discrepancy in the application of the law between these two groups of people, as well as the scope of what happened.
Is there? This is usually taken as an article of faith by conservatives, but no one seems to put any actual numbers out there. Based on the way Trump talks, you'd think nobody was arrested. In Minneapolis, for instance, there were about 100 people charged with felonies in the wake of the riots and another 500 or so charged with misdemeanors. That may not sound like a lot considering that those numbers represent two days of rioting during which over 100 structures burned, but the contexts of the arrests are rather similar. I'm hesitant to offer advice on how to get away with committing crimes, but I'd recommend against livestreaming your criminal activities or posting them to social media. the BLM riots took place at night and were distributed across a large area where there was minimal media presence. Jan 6 took place in the daytime, had a lot of people in a concentrated area, practically none of whom were trying to conceal their identity, and the area itself was swarming with media. The people who got arrested in Minnesota were largely those who decided to livestream looting or post their hauls on social media, and the same was true of virtually everyone who was arrested in connection to Jan 6. In an emergency situation, the police have higher priorities than arresting individuals. Practically nobody was actually arrested on Jan 6, but identifying he perpetrators was like shooting fish in a barrel. Not as many BLM protestors were quite this stupid, but the police didn't ignore those who were.
The other thing that makes this line of arguing particularly vacuous is that, even if the number of BLM protestors convicted is proportionally lower, I have yet to hear any Democratic politician suggest pardoning any of them.
Because the alternative is "we looked at this and decided you lose. No we won't tell you our logic." Does that seem like it's helping? If it's going to fail on the merits, show me the merits; allow the debate to happen.
I think you're confused about how the legal system actually works. First, I'm not sure if your complaint is that the cases should be heard on the merits or that the courts aren't issuing written opinions. If it's the latter, be aware that being told "you lose" without explanation has nothing to do with standing and is the norm in litigation; written opinions are very rare. Some motions are filed strictly to protect the record and won't be challenged if the opposing party indicates that they're going to contest them. In these cases the court won't even formally deny them. If we decide to argue a motion, we'll get some sense of the judge's reasoning based on how he responds during oral argument, but most judges don't say anything during argument and don't rule from the bench. A week or so later you'll get an order granting or denying the motion and that's it; you move on with the case. And yes, this includes motions to dismiss and motions for summary judgment where the judge is practically ending the Plaintiff's case, at lease against one defendant. And, not that it applies to the election cases, but jury verdicts don't offer any more insight. You either get a defense verdict or a bill, with no further commentary except in unusual situations.
Now, in some cases trial courts do issue written opinions, particularly in cases where there are novel issues and the court expects an appeal. In those cases, the court will occasionally write a brief opinion that isn't published and has no precedential value, but is in the records for the appellate court to look at if they want to. I agree that some of the trial courts could have done so here. There are two problems with this, though. First, these cases were all asking for emergency relief. You can't expect the court to act fast but nonetheless have time to issue opinions detailing their reasoning. The second problem is that this wouldn't do anything. The standing objections were obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the law, and there was plenty of commentary available. The court issuing an 86 page opinion that acts more or less as a primer on standing and why this Plaintiff doesn't have it would have done nothing to shift public opinion.
Now, if it's the former, and you really want the cases to be heard on their merits, then it gets even worse. First, I don't know what you mean by wanting full discovery power. Most of these lawsuits didn't involve any factual disputes. For instance, Texas v. Pennsylvania (which is what I assumed you had in mind when talking about dismissals based on standing) didn't involve any disputed facts. The question was whether actions taken by various state election officials violated the Constitution; no one was arguing that these actions weren't taken. An "on the merits" ruling by in trial court in this case would have likely been "there were no constitutional violations, you lose". Would that be a better outcome? Would a 120-page opinion explaining why state legislatures are allowed to delegate ministerial responsibilities really satisfy the people alleging MASSIVE FRAUD?
And what do you expect to accomplish with this discovery, anyway? None of the lawsuits, save Sidney Powell's, made any actual allegations of fraud. "Full discovery" is essentially asking the court to let you go on a fishing expedition. Where are you even going to start? If you file the day the election is called for Biden, you're looking at a few days for the defendants to respond, and for the judge to hear motions to dismiss. If he denies these motions and sets the case for trial, you're normally looking at a discovery deadline around May 1, over three months after Biden has been sworn in. Of course, there's no way you're even making that deadline, because you're going on a fishing expedition, which means you need to conduct discovery just to get to the point when you can begin conducting discovery. What are you looking for? Do you want emails? Are you going to request emails involving official election accounts in all the affected jurisdictions? You better plan on giving them ample time to sort through these emails to get rid of irrelevant information. Or since you don't trust them to do that you can sort through them yourself. How many emails do you think this is? How many of them do you think you'll actually want to use as evidence in court? How much time and money do you expect it to take for you to sort through all of these yourself? How many depositions do you plan on taking? Who do you plan on deposing? How much do you think this is going to cost? Given the breadth of the allegations, two years seems like an optimistic timetable for discovery completion, and that's before you get into all the other stuff. With any luck you might uncover the fraud and get your verdict before the next election. Assuming there are no appeals, Trump might actually be able to serve a few days of his term before being constitutionally ineligible.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Let's not forget Marilyn vos Savant, whose career revolved around answering logic questions in Parade magazine.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Probably not much. Liberia's political situation has only recently stabilized following decades of chaos and it will take a long time before institutions are robust enough to see any kind of real development. Corruption is still a huge problem, and there's little economic development. These are long-standing problems that don't go away just because everybody suddenly becomes a genius. The incentives that encourage shitty behavior don't disappear.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
McMaster-Carr, on the other hand, is well-known and respected for having a massive curated catalog of fasteners and other hardware.
McMaster-Carr is well-known for having a massive curated catalog of practically everything that an industrial operation could possibly need, and having it in stock and available on short notice. The fact that it will be a quality product almost goes without saying. And saying it's pricier is an understatement. I don't know about the website, but when my dad was a shop foreman he said there was a $25 minimum shipping cost on every order. They exist because if I'm running a factory or a steel mill or a chemical plant or any other kind of business, if something goes down and I need a part on short-notice they can get it there in a day rather than a week. For that reason, there probably isn't anything comparable for toys, or clothing, or other stuff that's ultimately inessential. There's no such thing as an emergency toy purchase. Their customers are willing to pay a premium because they lose a lot more money by not having the item.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
https://x.com/SaltyGoat17/status/1842944529172734286 - Woman saying she needs 500 body bags. County Sheriff kicked FEMA out of the county.
I don't know if I'd call this credible. The woman being interviewed never mentions FEMA once; the interviewer says it in an interspersed clip taped separately. And he doesn't say where they are. Possibly because he's in Lincoln County, which got some damage but is part of the Charlotte metro and a world away from the mountain areas that got hit hard.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
All these stories demonstrate is that the public has no idea what FEMA actually does. A friend of mine used to work for them, and spent over a year in Tinian working logistics in the aftermath of a Typhoon that barely made the news on the mainland. He told me that the only people FEMA will send to most places are administrators. The counties and municipalities handle the actual relief efforts, and above them is the state. FEMA's role is to provide funding, and the personnel they send are there to make sure the funding matches the planning that's done on the local level. They may provide an increased measure of assistance, but only if the localities in question can't handle it. That's why most of the direct FEMA work is done in places like Tinian, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, who can't really do it on their own. But FEMA isn't going to go into Florida and tell them how to handle hurricane relief. The states know their state better than FEMA and the counties know their county better than FEMA, and they aren't there to meddle. They may be doing a bit more than usual in Helene since the affected area isn't used to this kind of damage, but it's not like North Carolina isn't prepared to handle a hurricane. The posters below who say that no one has proven any examples of FEMA actually doing anything are probably right, because that's not what they're there for.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
They can, but the policy has coverage limits that are usually what you pay for the property.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Why, instead of doing all that work, doesn't a title insurer simply collect the payment and not do any work? If the current claims payout is 5%, maybe now it goes to 10%.
Because doing the legwork means the insurance is significantly cheaper than other forms of insurance in proportion to the total benefit. If I get the 15/30 minimum liability coverage in PA, it's probably going to cost about $800/year. $800 for a max payout of $30,000 means I'm paying 2.6% for one year of protection. On the other hand, the cost of title insurance on a $300,000 house is going to run about $1,500, so I'm paying 0.5% for protection as long as I own the home. If policyholders were paying $7,500 annually for title insurance, it might make sense to forgo the examination, because you'd then be able to absorb huge losses.
There's also the moral hazard issue where people don't attempt any funny stuff when they know they aren't going to get away with it, because there will always be a title search. Say I own a house that I'm offering for sale for $300,000, but I still have a mortgage that I owe $200,000 on. I list the property with a real estate agent, and Bob agrees to buy the home for the listed sale price. Bob's lender asks you to write a policy for their loan amount, and Bob purchases his share, and you write a policy for the full $300,000. At closing, the bank cuts me a check for the full purchase price, and I deposit it in my bank. After that, I stop paying on my existing mortgage, the bank forecloses and kicks Bob out of the house, and both Bob and the bank file claims for the full $300,000.
This lien isn't the kind of thing that's normally even a problem for title insurers; we'd just note it in the report so the closing attorney knows that the mortgage has to be satisfied to resolve it. But it's a serious risk if you don't even know about it.
Complicated mineral claims? Pschaw. I'll only do title insurance for houses and apartments.
Title insurance is mostly for homes and apartments, though commercial properties are insured as well. I did mineral work mostly and I've never heard of anyone insuring a mineral interest.
Presumably you don't built the registry from scratch. Just every time someone "runs title" it goes into the database and the next time someone runs title it just pulls the record for a flat fee of $50 or something.
The issue with doing that is that the company running the title isn't trying to uncover or resolve every possible claim against the property, only the ones that are likely to become problematic from a business perspective. It's essentially a cost-benefit analysis. If the government is guaranteeing title, however, it has to be ironclad. Due process requires notice and opportunity to be heard, which means that a more extensive search needs to be done, and all interest-holders have to be notified and able to present their case. I talk about this more in the post below, but what this means is that a complicated quiet title action needs to be performed so a court can make a determination of who owns what. Several states had this process for a while, but it proved too cumbersome to become popular. The countries that have it now started it when most of the land was unseated, and the system could be developed from scratch.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I think you're taking too narrow a view of "claim to this land". There's a common perception that these primarily involve claims involving a fee interest in the surface that arises from something like an unresolved estate, divorce, etc. The reality of the situation is much more complex. Consider a typical rural parcel in Western Pennsylvania, Northern West Virginia, or Southeastern Ohio:
A 20 acre tract with a house was purchased by the current owners in 2004. It has a clean chain of title with no gaps going back to patent. It was never part of an estate, lawsuit, divorce, bankruptcy, Sheriff's sale, or anything like that (the last two sentences are wholly atypical, but I'm simplifying things here). In 1901 the surface owner sold the Pittsburgh Seam coal to an intermediary who in turn sold it to a mining company, and through several further sales and corporate mergers it's now owned by Consol. In 1917 the oil and gas was leased to Allegheny Heat and Light Company, who drilled a well on the property in 1919. In 1922 the surface owner conveyed the property by deed and reserved "1/2 the oil and gas" underlying the property. The owner of the severed interest has since passed and the reserved 1/2 interest is now shared among 16 individuals, in unequal proportions. In 1940, the surface owners conveyed the Freeport Seam, but this coal was never mined. It is currently owned by Massey Energy. The 1919 well is still producing, meaning the 1917 lease is still in effect. Through various mergers and assignments, the lease is now held by Tri-Star Energy, LLC. In 2012, Tri-Star assigned the production rights to deep formations to Noble Energy. Noble then assigned the deep rights to Chevron but reserved an overriding royalty interest equal to the difference between 18% and the existing royalty burden. Statoil then assigned these rights to Rice Energy, who then merged with EQT. EQT, looking to develop the oil and gas, entered into a joint operating agreement with Chevron involving the Marcellus formation. 10.575 acres of the 20 acre tract were made part of the Piston Honda Unit. Piston Honda was then included as part of a $1.2 billion mortgage to Wells Fargo. EQT then sold the deeper Utica formation rights to Pennzoil Production Company. Over the years, there have been several recorded easements involving the property. The owners are aware of a gas line that crosses the road near the house and runs along the property's western edge, and some old telephone lines that cross the back corner of the property and may or may not be operational. When the property was purchased in 2004, it was financed through a mortgage with Wesbanco that is still in effect. In 2015, the owners took out a $25,000 revolving credit line with Dollar Bank that remains unreleased.
Under your proposed system, I count at least 27 potential claims to the property, and that's assuming that the surface owners won't have to make their own claim. "Contact us" is also vague, because in any reasonable system "contact us" means "file suit for quiet title". I say reasonable because no land registration system worth its salt would simply take a naked assertion of an interest in real property at face value. What's realistically going to happen in this situation is that every mortgage company, coal company, oil and gas company, telephone company, power company, water company, and other potential lienholder is immediately going to look through their records and file in rem actions against any piece of property upon which they have a plausible claim, seeking declaratory judgment that their claim is valid and that their interest can be recorded in the land registry. I don't even know how this would work in practice, because all those claimants would theoretically have to provide notice of the suit to all the other potential claimants, which would result in a huge mess of lawsuits that no calendar control judge could possible make heads or tails of, and there are additional complications that I won't even get into here. The worst outcome would be that the couple who bought the land in 2004, got title insurance, and haven't had any problems since are now going to find themselves defending numerous claims, and are likely going to have to spend a ton on legal fees just to maintain what they have. Is that 1965 power line easement still valid or not? West Penn Power is going to argue that it is. Companies will never concede that any right of record has been invalidated.
This is why land registration systems typically put the burden of proving title on the surface owner. In the Progressive era, this was touted as a reform over traditional title, and something like a dozen states implemented land registration systems between around 1900 and 1917. Most of these have been abolished, and the remaining ones are just pale ghosts of what they were intended to be, vestigial remnants of ill-considered reform. The problem is exactly what I stated earlier: If you're going to make title ironclad, you have to ensure that the registration accounts for all existing interests. And to accomplish this, you have to provide anyone with an interest due process to ensure that their property rights are respected. What this means in practice is that someone seeking to register title under these systems was required to conduct a thorough search and file suit in court, with any conceivable interest holder notified in the suit. Even in the early 20th Century, with fewer than 100 years having passed since patent and things like mortgages and mineral leases in their infancy, this proved an expensive prospect, which brings me to your second point:
It's a one time payment that permanently does away with 'running titles', so it's still probably worth it in the long run.
Is it? The problem is that it places all of the burden on the person seeking to register the title. I've handled partition suits before, which are similar but much more limited actions, and you're still looking at 5 figures to resolve the suit. Get into a situation where you have to notify every party with an interest in the property, and you're now looking at the cost ballooning exponentially. All the minor claims that a title insurance company would ignore under the presumption that no one would raise them (and that if they were raised, it was rare enough that they'd just pay), now have to be litigated. And how is a court to determine if you've done the proper due diligence? If a title is registered, it's supposed to be indefeasible. But what if a critical party wasn't properly notified of the action? What if the party seeking the registration intentionally did a half-assed job in the hope that potential claimants would slip under the radar? This became a problem in states with registration as the 20th Century wore on, as the process essentially became a way for people with questionable titles to legitimize their claims so that they were beyond reproach. Otherwise, what's the benefit to the landowner? Pay $25,000 (conservatively) now so that future purchasers can save a couple thousand bucks on title insurance?
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I worked as a title attorney for a decade. It's not a scam. Most of what you're paying for isn't to theoretically pay off future claims, but to pay for work done up front to prevent future claims. This requires them to send someone down to the courthouse to gather all of the title documents, which are than sent to an attorney who looks for issues and drafts a list of exceptions that the policy won't cover. If the exceptions are minor things like utility easements and the like that don't really affect the value of the property, the company will write the policy. About a third of the time, though, there are major issues that require the insurance company to do further curative work before they'll move forward. The reason such a small percentage goes toward paying out claims is because the vast, vast majority of your premium is spent on getting assurance that there won't be any claims.
Now, theoretically you could forgo the insurance and research the title on your own, but this will inevitable cost you more than just getting the damn insurance because you're now paying the full hourly rate for an attorney who may or may not have any significant experience doing title work, whereas the insurance company has an attorney on its payroll for a lot less, and this guy does nothing but titles. And they'll also be able to delegate a lot of the legwork to other staff, who also do nothing but titles. So you're paying less for a superior product. Theoretically you could also do the research yourself but I highly, highly would not recommend even thinking about even attempting this. Even having spent ten years doing titles that were much more complex than typical residential real estate transactions, there's no way in hell I wouldn't buy title insurance. I've seen too much.
Other countries (not the US) have central land registries and dispense with title insurance altogether.
The problem there is that we would have to essentially run a full title for all land going back to patent. Most title insurance companies only do a 60 year search, because claims beyond that are rare enough that occasionally having to pay one isn't a big deal. But it becomes important if you're making ironclad assurances. You could theoretically get around this by passing a marketable title that acts as an effective statute of limitations on claims, but you stil don't avoid the basic problem: It would still be really expensive. How long and how much do you think it would cost to run full title on all 585,000 parcels in Allegheny County? You're probably talking billions, when you consider that a lot of these are going to be industrial and commercial properties that have much more complex titles than a simple residential subdivision lot. Rural counties have fewer parcels, but rural work poses its own problems; those titles are almost never easy. Then there are the associated costs of curing all those titles (a buyer can always walk away), developing and implementing the system, and dealing with the inevitable lawsuits that follow. I did a lot of work in Ohio right when oil and gas was starting to take off. The state had passed a dormant mineral act that sought to simplify things: Rather than having to track down the innumerable hard-to-find heirs of someone who severed a mineral interest in 1919 and then forgot about it, any interest that hadn't seen any action within the past 20 years would merge with the surface. Seems simple enough on its face. This led to a decade of wrangling and counting, with the Ohio Supreme Court getting involved on several occasions, to determine when an interest is actually terminated. We basically had to hold off on interpreting it for a while while the cases worked their way through the courts. I doubt the wholesale termination of old surface interests would be that much different.
Are you actually familiar with NFL marketing, or are you just making assumptions? The NFL is unique among major pro sports leagues in that it has realized that there is no better marketing tool than the game itself. Baseball tries to appeal to tradition and present itself as a sort of timeless, historical pastime that acts as a bridge to a better era of American life (which seems preposterous today and is probably why their numbers have been declining for years). The NBA tries to create synergy with anything that might engage youth culture (hip hop, fashion, primordial competition, nostalgia for the 1990s, the word "amazing", etc.). NASCAR appeals to Red State contrarianism. Soccer appeals to people who see themselves as forward-thinking globalists who appreciate fandom more than sports. But the NFL just uses football.
Unlike the other leagues, the NFL never tries to trick anyone into watching something they weren't otherwise inclined to watch. The league's marketing revolves around two things: 1. Making football essential to people who are already inclined to like it, and 2. Making it more essential to people who already find it essential. Occasional shots of Taylor Swift aside, they have no desire of appealing to the casual fan, or luring a 15-year-old in off his skateboard. Unlike Gary Bettman's vision for the NHL, the NFL has no desire to push its product on nonchalant audiences with transitory interest.
One only has to look at the evolution of NFL draft coverage. For decades, this was strictly a business meeting that took place in a hotel conference room. Then, in 1980, a representative from a fledgling cable network called ESPN asked commissioner Pete Rozelle if he could televise the event and Rozelle's response was "Um, I guess you can if you want to. Why would anyone want to watch that?" Soon they started allowing a small live audience. Then they moved the event to the weekend. Then they moved the event to larger venues to accommodate larger audiences. Coverage snowballed; soon you couldn't get away from it. In the 2010s they moved to a three-day prime-time event. Then they started rotating among NFL venues to accommodate ever larger live audiences. Then it moved on to broadcast television. This year, 775,000 people showed up to watch the draft in Detroit. The NFL never sought to turn a boring meeting where not much happened into a major event, it just sort of worked out that way. Other leagues have tried to turn their drafts into similar extravaganzas, but for some reason they just can't trick people into taking them seriously.
If you want further proof of this, look at the one thing the NFL has tried to aggressively market: The Pro Bowl. All-star games used to be big deals. Baseball had 2 a year at one point, and the NHL and NBA games were always something to watch. The Pro Bowl lacked the prestige of these games, and the NFL never could figure it out; why does a game featuring the best players of the most popular sport in America draw so much apathy? For years, the league just sort of shrugged, but then they decided to do something about it. First, they moved it from the weekend after the Super Bowl to the weekend before the Super Bowl. The logic was that the other leagues got better ratings by holding their all-star games in-season. Doing this snuffed out what appeal the Pro Bowl had: Despite being an inferior game, it was the last chance to watch football for months. Then they moved it from Hawaii to the mainland, eliminating the appeal of seeing sportscasters casually dressed in khakis and Hawaiian shirts outdoors in a tropical paradise while my world is covered in a foot of snow. Then they ditched the AFC–NFC matchup and let old-timer coaches pick their own teams, which meant I couldn't even reflexively root for the AFC because they had all the Steelers on them. Around the time they started monkeying with the format was around the same time the players themselves stopped caring. While they never went all-out, until 2010 or so it at least looked like a normal football game. But the physicality got less and less until the lines were playing patty cake with each other and players were giving up as soon as a defender got near them. Then the defenders stopped even trying to tackle. Then the refs started just blowing plays dead when they were obviously over. So the NFL's most recent fix is the Pro Bowl Games, a series of skills competitions and flag football games that NFL Network Radio won't even cover. Ratings are lower than ever.
The biggest clue to the NFL's marketing, though, is its non-football content. I'm specifically talking about NFL Network radio, and how its programming differs from typical sports talk. Most of the latter consists of loudmouths with big egos and no sports knowledge trying to outdo each other with contrarian hot takes so morons will get fired up enough to call in and argue. They'll focus on the absolute stupidest drivel and make that the centerpiece of discussion for a week. The worst was when, a few years back, one local guy suggested that the Steelers should trade for Patrick Peterson, and they might as well give up on the season if they didn't. Never mind that neither the Steelers, nor the Cardinals, nor Mr. Peterson had any interest in making that trade happen; it was all a media fabrication. Contrast that with NFL Network Radio, where all the hosts have impeccable credentials and assume the audience knows about football. The callers ask intelligent questions, and they get intelligent answers. Shows like Movin' the Chains say "We're going to give you in-depth analysis and if you have any questions, we're experts who can answer them." They don't say stupid shit so some guy flipping through the dial while stuck in traffic will get pissed off enough to hate listen.
In essence, NFL Network Radio works exactly like FOX News: It stays on message and invents talking points for its core constituency to absorb. If Jalen Hurts is temporarily benched for Kenny Pickett in week ten, how will he react? Is his contract an albatross? Has Eagles coach Nick Sirianni lost control of his offense? Is Sirianni on the hot seat? Will Pickett be able to redeem himself after his career in Pittsburgh came to an ignominious end? How will this impact your fantasy team? These are the ideas football fans are supposed to talk about during the run-up to week eleven, and NFL Network Radio ensures that those debates will be part of the public discourse. It does not matter that Hurts did not lose his job or if the Eagles are out of playoff contention. By inventing and galvanizing the message, NFL Network Radio (and by extension the NFL) can always deliver the precise product people want. The idea that anyone is being tricked is preposterous.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
Not the OP, but to answer your questions:
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First, there are people such as myself who will watch older NFL games because we want to see how the game evolved and because we like to reminisce, but that's obviously not the majority of people. The reason most people don't have any interest in watching older NFL games is because of the inherent drama of a live event. If a game starts at 1 pm, few people who can't watch it then are going to tape it to watch later (and those who do are the kind of people who will watch a rebroadcast of Super Bowl XXVI if they catch it on TV). For most people, watching older sports broadcasts is like watching random episodes of World News Tonight from the 1970s; it may be entertaining but what originally made it compelling is irrelevant. If you think this is due to hype, I'll pose this question: If this Sunday, the NFL played all of its normal games, but put the entire week's promotion budget toward Tuesday Night Prime-Time reairs of the games from Week 5 of the 2018 season, which games do you think would get higher ratings? Would hype alone lead more people in Pittsburgh to watch Steelers–Falcons from 6 years ago as opposed to their current matchup with the Cowboys?
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It depends on whether the customer liked the product. If it's a good product then they'll feel that their appetite for leisure and discretionary spending has been satisfied. If it's a bad product, they may feel they've been tricked. But if their appetite isn't satisfied then they probably won't buy the product again, and certainly wouldn't buy it again repeatedly. If the average NFL viewer felt he'd been tricked, the league would have gone out of business a long time ago. You act as though people watch football games and are disappointed at the end, but nonetheless fall for the hype week after week.
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Adidas makes athletic shoes. Messi is one of the greatest athletes in the world. It is rational for me to assume he wouldn't endorse a shoddy product. If you were offered two bicycles by manufacturers you hadn't heard of, and your only information was that one model was used in the Tour de France and the other one wasn't, which one would it be more rational to assume is better?
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Biden let Iran triple their oil exports because he didn't really have a choice. After Russia invaded Ukraine, gas prices shot through the roof, and he would've gotten skewered if he didn't do something to get them down. He had three options: Ease sanctions on Iran, decline to put sanctions on Russia, or do nothing. Declining to sanction Russia would have made him look incredibly weak at a time there was broad consensus that something had to be done to punish Russia for the invasion. Doing nothing would have led to complaints about rising gas prices. Easing sanctions on Iran was the most palatable option at the time. Americans don't like Iran, but not enough that they're willing to pay $4.50/gallon to extend the middle finger.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
The Al-Jazeera article linked below gives a decent overview, but it's surface-level. I'll try to give a more in-depth summary. After WWII, there was significant local resistance to the traditional Middle-Eastern monarchies. These were seen as decadent, old-fashioned stooges to Western sugar daddies. Arab Nationalism, and related ideologies like Nasserism and Ba-athism, sought to cast off the yoke of these monarchies and institute modern, socialist-leaning, authoritarian governments that wouldn't be afraid to play the US and USSR against each other. Egypt was the most dramatic of these. Nasser skillfully kicked out both the monarchy and the British, and while Western governments initially had confidence in him as a reformer, he was soon regarded as a loose cannon; when the US refused to sell him arms for use against Israel, he had no problem turning to the USSR, who had no problem accommodating him. Iran would have its own shot at this in the early 1950s, which was famously cut short by the US's own covert restoration of the monarchy.
Nasser's own pan-Arab dreams would lead him to advocate for similar revolutions in other countries. Iraq and Syria would see their own revolutions, and Aden would kick out the British along similar lines. But monarchies still remained, most notably Saudi Arabia, whose close ties with the United States were regarded as suspect. When dispossessed Palestinians formed the PLO in 1964, they looked to the Pan-Arab revolutionaries for inspiration. It was a nationalist movement, but it was also socialist.
When Israel occupied the West Bank following the 6-day war in 1967, the PLO was forced into Jordan, from where they staged terrorist attacks into Israel. The problem was that Jordan was a monarchy under King Hussein. The other problem was that while Jordan was officially at war with Israel, Hussein was a pragmatist who enjoyed good relations with the United States, and he didn't like the idea of the PLO turning his country into a terrorist state. The last straw came with the PLO's attempted assassination of Hussein and overthrow of the Jordanian government in 1970. Jordanian troops would expel the PLO, who then took up in Lebanon.
So now the PLO is in southern Lebanon, and Yassir Arafat is gaining notoriety as the world's preeminent Arab terrorist. The situation is much the same as it was in Jordan, except that the Lebanese government is a mess and isn't equipped to do anything about it, giving the PLO essentially free-reign in the South. When Lebanon erupts into civil war in 1975, Israel, who supported the existing Maronite government, took the opportunity to invade and establish a buffer zone. While they got their buffer zone, it didn't eliminate the PLO, but drove them further north. By 1981, and international peacekeeping force had brokered a ceasefire agreement, which ended the war but left a peacekeeping force in place.
In the meantime, Pan-Arabism was on its last legs. Following Nasser's death, Anwar Sadat took control of Egypt in the early 1970s. With Soviet help, he took one last shot at Israel in the Yom Kippur War, but was soundly defeated. Realizing that the only hope at regaining any of the lost territory was through a negotiated settlement, he agreed to the Camp David Accords in 1978. While this didn't mean the immediate fall of the other secular states, it cast a pall on the movement as a whole. Egypt would no longer be the alpha dog in the region.
But who would? Among the remaining secular states, Iraq was the most obvious candidate, with its central location, large population, and large army. In a couple years Sadaam Hussein would rise to power in an attempt to assert this vision. Syria was small and was wrapped up in wars in Israel and Lebanon it couldn't win. Jordan had its own Israel problems; while officially at war, Hussein was too pragmatic about his relationship with the country to be openly hostile. The other monarchies were small and weak, and some were barely independent. The one that wasn't was Saudi Arabia, awash in American arms and domestic oil money. But as a monarchy, it had a credibility problem similar to Egypt's. The ruling family was significantly more conservative than most of the various Kings and Emirs, and while this meant they didn't seem as decadent as the others, it did make them seem more old-fashioned. It would be hard to unite the people around a King, of all things.
And then there was Iran. Persian where the rest of the region is Arab, Shia where the rest of the region is Sunni. Still one of the monarchies, but things are changing. An exiled Ayatollah has found something for the people to cling to that's a far cry from Pan-Arabism: Religious fervor. Guys like Nasser saw this kind of thing as detrimental to their countries' modernization, but by 1979, its day had come. Kohmeni would swoop into Tehran and depose the Shah, instituting his own ideal form of religious-led government. I'm going to assume you know about the Iranian revolution so I won't recount the story here. But there was a lesser-known revolution in Saudi Arabia around the same time. In the wake of the Ayatollah taking power, Juhayman al-Otaybi and a group of 600 fanatics seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca in an attempt to overthrow the House of Saud. The attempt was unsuccessful, but it spooked the royal family enough that they abandoned the meager steps they had taken towards modernization in favor of an increasingly Islamist policy.
By the early 1980s, there were three powers squaring off to dominate the region: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. Iraq, sensing weakness in the chaos surrounding the Iranian Revolution, struck first, invading Iran in 1980. Meanwhile, Israel invaded Lebanon again in 1982, laying siege to Beirut, in an attempt to drive out the PLO for good. By the end of the year, Arafat agreed to move operations to Tunis, far out of striking distance of Israel. But that didn't solve Lebanon's problems. Shiites in the south had become resentful of the constant occupations, whether from the PLO, Israel, or international peacekeepers. This resentment culminated in the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut and the formation of Hezbollah.
Iraq, having committed itself to a war that was looking increasingly like a stalemate, and not being too keen on the whole religious fanaticism thing, was looking less and less like the new alpha dog. Iran's chance didn't look much better. It was bogged down in the war itself, and it would be hard to find followers of Shiites in a region that was overwhelmingly Sunni. There were plenty of Shiites in Iraq, but the situation on the ground made it inconceivable that Iran would be able to draw them into its sphere. But Iran did have one advantage that Saudi Arabia didn't. In 1983, Egypt was at peace with Israel, and Hussein was unwilling to get too involved. Assad in Syria blamed Israel for everything, but he was a secular Ba'athist and his military situation wasn't great. But now there was Hezbollah, Shiites in a land of Sunnis, in perfect position to pick up where the PLO left off before being exiled to Tunis.
So Iran decided to become Hezbollah's sugar daddy. This became readily apparent to the United States relatively early. As Hezbollah started taking Americans hostages in the 1980s, it became clear to negotiators pretty quickly that they took their marching orders from Iran (the Iran-Contra Affair was an attempt to negotiate the release of these hostages). As the power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia has grown more acute over the decades, Iran has used its position as a supporter of Iran and enemy of Israel to gain support among the wider region. Consider the Abraham Accords. The basic idea behind them is that if Muslim-majority countries establish diplomatic relations with Israel, it will isolate Palestinian hardliners and force them to the negotiating table. The one potential weakness in such a policy is that, while the governments of these countries know that peace with Israel benefits them in the long run, the position is still wildly unpopular among the Arab public.
Iran knows that keeping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict going on as long as possible is to its long-term benefit. While I agree with the Trump's policy in this area generally, I shake my head when he or Jared Kushner says that the October 7 attacks wouldn't have happened had he been president. Biden continued Trump's diplomatic policy in the region, and a year ago it looked like Saudi Arabia would be establishing relations with Israel in the not-too-distant future. October 7 provoked a response from Israel that made any chance of recognition politically impossible. A policy of alienating Hamas terrorists has been replaced by a policy of simply eliminating them. The more support Iran can give to those who are on the front lines, the more credibility they build with the Arab public, while Saudi Arabia, beholden to the United States, is forced to stand aloof. They're also far enough away from Israel that the risk of direct conflict is relatively low. This is why Israel assassinated Haniyeh in Iran. Beyond being a high-value target, it sends a message — You're not safe. We can waltz into your country any time and kill anyone we want to, and there's nothing you can do about it. Lob all the poorly-guided missiles you want to.
Whether this strategy plays out for Iran is anyone's guess. Power politics has completely overtaken religious fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia is liberalizing, and the more extreme fanaticism of Al-Qaeda and ISIL has given the movement a bad name locally in some of these places. After 45 years, Iran's sphere of influence is limited to Hezbollah, Yemen, parts of Iraq, and Hamas, and the last of those is very recent and not exactly in a good position right now. The Saudis, meanwhile, have all the weapons and all the money. They have the West; Iran has Russia and North Korea. They've also seen internal resistance in recent years that, while it was never close to bringing down the government, was much more than Saudi Arabia has had to deal with.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
It's only been a few days. The flooding still hasn't subsided and larger rivers are still rising from the water working it's way downstream. Three of the four interstate routes into Asheville are closed due to landslides. Bridges are washed out, making some areas hard to reach without an airlift. Roads are destroyed. When this happens in the mountains it isn't like a storm surge that recorded rather quickly. Flat land doesn't slide, and while rivers may flood, the velocity they reach in the mountains makes it more likely they'll take out bridges. And bridges are everywhere; here in Western Pennsylvania pretty much every road has a creek running alongside it, and a lot of people have bridges to get into their driveways. We're just getting to the point where we can even start cleaning up; Gov. Cooper just called up the National Guard yesterday. Biden said he's visiting later in the week. It's also a bit rich for Trump to criticize Biden's disaster response after Hurricane Maria.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
That sounds good in theory, but the reality is that court backlogs aren't the reason these cases take so long to resolve, and trying to force the issue actually increases the chance that the prosecution loses. Technically speaking, appeals are on a strict timeline. In reality, like most things in law, nothing is that strict. I can't speak for all states, but here's how it works in Pennsylvania:
After sentencing, the defense has 10 days to file a post-trial motion. This is where you list all the errors you think the court made and politely ask the court to reconsider them. Since you only have ten days to file, though, you pro-forma list every adverse decision the judge made. At this point, the judge has 120 days to grant or deny the relief. Since these motions are rarely granted, the default is that if no decision has been rendered in 120 days, they are automatically denied. Since this doesn't require the judge to actually do anything, you can expect to wait the full 120 days. Then you have 30 days to file notice of appeal. Once the notice is filed, the court will send a docketing statement, that has a deadline by which you must file a Statement of Errors with the trial court. Except you just got the transcript after 4 months, and this transcript is 11,000 pages long, and you need time to go through it to catch all the errors. So 2 weeks before the Statement is due, you file a motion with the court for an extension, which they grant, because the prosecution doesn't oppose it, because if they did then defense counsel would never agree to their extension requests. So the deadline gets extended by a month.
Once the Statement is finally submitted, the trial judge has to actually respond to every argument. And he's going to take his sweet time responding because he's about to start another trial which he isn't about to postpone for the third time just so he can respond to your long-shot motion, so add another couple months onto that. Once he's explained why your arguments are bullshit, you have to file a brief in support of your motion, which you nominally have 30 days to do but which you're going to ask for an extension on because you've raised so many issues that you need time to properly research the issues and apply the law to the facts in this monster transcript. And the prosecution again raises no opposition, because they don't exactly have an attorney assigned to handling this appeal and the trial team are all busy trying to incarcerate criminals who aren't in jail indefinitely and don't have the time to spend going through that 11,000 page transcript themselves and countering all of your arguments. After all, if they contest your motion then you're not exactly going to be inclined to grant them any extensions, which means their brief would be dogshit and you'd waive oral argument while the appeals court remands the case for a new trial and they're back to square one. So you get your extension. And since you got your extension, you're in no position to request their request for an extension, and they get one as well. And once you get their brief you now have 14 days to file a reply brief, which you probably don't do unless they made a particularly bad argument, but anyway. Now, a year and a half after sentencing, we're finally at the point where the case can even get scheduled for argument.
The upshot is that it's not so much the court's time that's the problem but the attorneys' time. We can certainly increase the speed of these appeals by hiring dedicated appellate teams for local DA's offices, but these offices don't have the budgets to fully staff their offices as it is. Why would we prioritize these cases? These defendants have already been convicted and are going to be in jail forever and a day regardless of what happens. Every capital case that gets fast tracked means another case gets bumped. Is this really more important than a free speech case? Or a case where there are legitimate questions about illegal searches? Or even a commercial case where the law is genuinely ambiguous? Shouldn't we dedicate what limited resources we have toward prosecuting crimes where the defendants haven't been convicted and might not be? Or do we raise local taxes to give DA's offices more money? That won't sit well in red areas. In Washington County, a rural/exurban county outside of Pittsburgh, the new DA has decided to make a statement by charging every murder he can as a capital case. His first year in office there were 9 murders in a county of about 200,000 people. He charged 5 capital cases, including 1 woman whose only connection to the crime was that her fingerprint had been found on a shell casing. This isn't a particularly large office. He probably could've gotten plea deals on most of these, but instead he has to waste taxpayer money on a quixotic attempt at securing the death penalty in a state that has a moratorium on executions, and that is considering abolishing capital punishment on the grounds that it's an inefficient generator of the bullshit described above.
Not just an NFL B-league, but the crappiest form of NFL B-league. I'd kill for a true NFL B-league compared to the way this is going to look. No draft, no salary cap, players able to leave whenever they feel like it as soon as another team offers more money. I know I said I didn't want to get into it, but I'll probably make a post next week about why I think the sport is going to reach a breaking point some time within the next decade or so. Suffice it to say that, in addition to all the antitrust stuff that isn't going to go away, I think the networks have overextended themselves a bit with the size of these Power 2 deals. There's only so much money to go around, and God forbid if we enter into a recession, in which case (as my friends in video production always point out) advertising is the first thing to get cut. Even without a recession, comparable future deals just might not be that profitable, especially considering that the SEC has historically taken a lower payout than the Big 10 despite having larger market share. There's nothing I'd like to see more than Florida State negotiate a settlement that's still really expensive, go to the Big 10 but be limited partners for the duration of the existing deal (as are oregon and Washington, who only make about half of what the ACC teams get), only to find that the next deal isn't as lucrative as they had anticipated, which wouldn't be a problem except that they're already in hock to the private equity firm that financed the exit fee.
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