fishbane

Has it been definitively confirmed that Askren developed the pneumonia from staph or is that still a rumor? Though potentially not relevant to Askren's condition, pneumonia can be caused by viruses such as influenza and coronavirus. There are vaccines available for both of those viruses.

The reason for mentioning not wrestling Glory and the relatively weak competition Lee faced in 2020 and 2021 was two fold. It refutes the FRL presumption that Lee had a tougher schedule than Abas. It also brings into question how healthy and unaffected Lee was with a torn ACL. Looking dominant against lesser competition doesn't mean he wasn't limited by the injury. Lee wrestled his senior year in high school with a torn ACL. He was dominant and a prohibitive favorite when he lost to DeSanto in the state final.

You keep inventing things that I am not arguing to argue against. I never said Lee wasn't or shouldn't have been a big favorite to win in 2020. Lee has been the favorite in every match he has ever lost before 2024. I never said that Lee was afraid of Glory. I said you mischaracterized that Spencer Lee wrestled the whole season, was healthy, and was in peak shape. He was on a pitch count, had a torn acl, and though he looked great he didn't wrestle the top contenders in either folkstyle or freestyle.

Pitch count and defaulting out of Midlands != Wrestled full season Torn ACL, Knee brace, pitch count, and defaulting out of Midlands != healthy

Pitch count and skipping two matches at the Midlands does not sound like he wrestled the entire season. I am sure the story they were telling at the time was the pitch count to prepare for the Olympics and definitely not any injury. It wasn't until the after the 2021 NCAA final and having torn the other one that Lee disclosed the ACL tear in the 2019 NCAA finals. The fact that he had a torn ACL and was skipping matches both point to him being not fully fit. He was impressive at that Olympic Trials qualifier in December. I had forgotten the match with Vito. He was wearing something on that knee during the match, but it appeared to be soft - a very "light" brace. Maybe that was a bad idea or they had the pitch count too high because his next event was Midlands where he defaulted out and by the end of the season he was wearing the full blown knee brace in the Big Ten final. Ultimately one can only speculate on how Lee could have done at the Olympic Trials. Although he was impressive in winning that qualifier the favorites to make the team were not there as they had already qualified. Abas wrestled at the trials in 2000 and lost in the challenge tournament final finishing 3rd on the ladder. I am sure Spencer Lee was as unafraid of Pat Glory as Stephen Abas was unafraid of Jeremy Hunter (2000 NCAA Champ), Jody Stritmatter (2000 #1 seed NCAAs, 3rd place finisher, and Midlands runner-up) , and Teague Moore (2000 Midlands champ). Abas probably skipped Midlands because he was focusing on freestyle and his team was not attending. He also didn't have the same incentive to wrestle an NCAA season as Lee. Iowa had not won an NCAA team title in ten years and PSU was rebuilding that year. Lee could have been the difference between winning a team title. Indeed that would be the case in 2021. Had Lee skipped the 2020-21 season to try and prepare for the delayed Olympics Iowa would not have won NCAAs. Iowa's margin of victory was only 15.5 points. If Abas was potentially the difference between Fresno winning a team title in 2000 he may have tried to do both as well.

He defaulted out of Midlands twice. In 2020 he did it without losing. He also did it his freshman year after losing to Ronnie Bresser.

If you're referring to what I said, that wasn't it. I disagreed with your assessment that that season Lee "wrestled the entire season and was healthy and in prime shape." He wrestled with one ACL having torn the other one in the 2019 NCAA final. He defaulted out of the Midlands choosing not to wrestle Pat Glory. How is that healthier than 2019 where he wrestled the entire year save for part of one match with two ACLs. My suspicion is that is that Lee wasn't healthier or better in his Hodge winning seasons (2019-2020 and 2020-2021) than the others, but that he wrestled an abbreviated schedule against much weaker competition.

This is a bit of a mischaracterization of 2020. If I recall Lee had torn an ACL in the 2019 NCAA final with Jack Mueller, so he would have been wrestling with 1 ACL. He also medically defaulted out of Midlands where he would have faced Pat Glory. Glory finished the season undefeated and was the 2 seed that year. Which brings up the point that Lee was largely untested that year. The only wrestler he faced that season that AAed in 2018,2019, 2021, or 2022 was Nick Piccininni. This was in part because of all the guys that sat out with an Olympic redshirt (Suriano, Arujau) like Abas did in 2000, but even relative to the field that year he had a weak schedule. His only opponents that where seeded in the top 10 at NCAAs were Piccininni and Devin Schroder. This brings to mind Pyles's earlier point that the Big Ten schedule would be tougher than what Abas faced wrestling for Fresno State. The Big Ten was tough at 125 Lee's first two years (Lizak, Rivera, Suriano, and Tomasello), but 2020, 2021, and 2023 it was pretty weak. The top guys were Ramos, McKee, Barnett, DeAugustino, Cronin, Foley, and Schroder. The extra years with the older guys did not add much difficulty compared with the first two. I think Abas would have been untroubled by such a schedule.

Today on FRL Pyles briefly revisited 125/Spencer Lee and he said something like they should only evaluate Lee's "4 year window" which he regarded at 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. He reasoned Lee was as good as it gets during that time and it was before the injury redshirt. Often the current wrestlers will have extra years that need to be adjusted in some way when comparing past wrestlers who were largely on the same 4 in 5 track but surprisingly that isn't really necessary with Abas. Abas did the old school double redshirt using an Olympic year. After graduating high school, Abas's NCAA career went Redshirt-4-1-Olympic Redshirt-1-1 and Lee was 1-1-COVID-1-Redshirt-6. So they were both in their 6th year out of high school at their last NCAAs.

Additionally Abas made world teams whilst still in college. He was the rep in 2001 and 2002. 2002 was the year Abas graduated. The US didn't send a team to Iran in 2001. At the time I recall Abas wanting defy the boycott and travel on his own to the world champioships.

One point Pyles made on FRL regarding 125 was a perceived difficulty difference in the schedule Abas wrestled at Fresno vs Lee at Iowa. He didn't really look at it in depth but more took it as a given and I'm not sure that's the case. Abas was the first wrestler to win 4 CKLV titles. No one else did it until Logan Stieber. Spencer Lee's biggest regular season tournament wins are the UNI Open and the Soldier Salute. The years Lee went to Midlands he either lost or defaulted out. Abas also wrestled in the All Star classic 2x and the National Duals once. Iowa has largely opted out of these events during Spencer Lee's tenure. Abas also famously lost to Eric Guerrero at 133 in a dual, so they were wrestling some top teams in duals too. If Abas wrestled more matches and hit big events like CKLV, National Duals, and the NCWA All Star Classic it's probably a wash, no?

Illegal immigrants as a whole lean democrat. By how much and how large of an impact would that have an federal elections is the relevant question. Nationwide Harris won the latino vote by only a 51-46% margin and Trump had some degree of success winning over latino voters even in very blue states like NY, where he was able to get 36% of the vote. The illegal immigrant population has proportionally more men than the voting population and men more often vote republican than women. The path to citizenship and voting rights for illegal immigrants is a long one. The average voter that immigrated illegally is likely to be older and thus also more likely to vote Republican. If we imagine the population of illegal immigrants that eventually gain citizenship/voting rights Trump would probably do somewhat better than the 36% we saw in NY in 2024. Finally the states with the largest illegal immigrant populations are either border states or blue states with sanctuary cities. These are either solidly red or solidly blue making the impact to the electoral college vote less significant. I think there would be no advantage to pander to noncitizens hoping that in the future they might gain the right to vote. All things being equal such a plan would be at a disadvantage to a candidate pandering to current voters instead. A change in Republican policy would only happen if enough illegal immigrants became citizens/voters that it makes sense to change pandering. The impact of bad policies can far outlast a term, but this happens as things stands right now. Republicans will be blaming issues on Biden's disastrous policies for years. The eventuality of the theory that Democrats are importing voters is supposed to be much worse - Republicans will not be able to win a presidential election ever again. That doesn't seem sustainable. Voting for change when things are not going well is a powerful thing. I don't think it will happen either. It could be worth it for the country regardless of which party it benefits electorally. The US would be the largest country by area. There is a huge amount of natural resources in Canada.

This is an unserious suggestion. Why would Canada join if they weren't granted voting rights? Is a democracy with ~43M unable to vote in the presidential election and without meaningful representation in the legislature actually a democracy? The answer must be no.

It's a difficult task to estimate the number of illegal immigrants. I understand the border Tsar's skepticism that the number of illegal immigrants has been flat at 12 million for so long (since 2007), but I am perhaps more skeptical of his number. The Trump administration has at times decided to make up a number or misrepresent things when it suits them (2017 inauguration attendant, DOGE with the Social Security database, etc.) and the trend he cites was created by an independent agency over multiple different administrations. Nevertheless it could be more than 14M.

They briefly discussed Askren at the start of FRL today. If the FRL staff have some inside details on Askren's condition they did not share it. They simply reiterated what his wife said and asked for prayers. No mention of staph. Hope he pulls through.

This wouldn't be the first time Musk called someone a pedophile in an unrelated twitter spat. There was no truth to it the last time.

Elon Musk? I don't like him, don't care for him, never did. I would guess the BBB was made available to Musk before it was introduced in the house and just like most of the house reps that voted for it he didn't read the 1,000+ page tome. Now he knows what's in it and he isn't happy.

Probably hasn't changed much since March.

It should be something they take seriously. It's been a while since I organized a USAW chartered club, but the insurance coverage included with club membership used to include coverage for sexual abuse and molestation claims and a requirement of that coverage was that all club coach's had USAW coach's cards and background checks. If they have coaches/administrators working with the kids that didn't go through the back ground screening then they aren't covered.

Here is the section of the USAW background check policy where it says who needs them "USA Wrestling has mandatory background screening as an extension of USA Wrestling’s Safe Sport Policy for the purpose of determining eligibility for USA Wrestling member coaches, officials and state association national or regional team volunteer members, and anyone who is authorized to be in a position of authority over or has regular contact with athletes." It sounds like this individual would be required to get a background screening. Not all charges/offenses would make him/her ineligible to participate. Here is the section on that. Even if this person has one of these it may have popped up in the screening and went through the process to "determine the individual's level of access" whatever that is.

Everyone with a USAW coaches card gets a background check every two years. So everyone should if involved at all with the state fargo team. If this individual will be coaching on the floor in Fargo then definitely.

Crazy how quickly he is potentially coming out the other side of this.

Estimating the number of illegal immigrants definitely is the difficult bit. I am not seeing the numbers you quote for illegal immigrants at the link you provided. It's fairly confusing though since they have a bunch of numbers for total immigrants, non citizen immigrants, and illegal immigrants. Using the numbers in table 2 including minor children of immigrants (presumably citizens), I see +4 seats net for blue states in 2030, -2 in the battleground states, and -2 in red states. Looking at the section on the 2030 estimates it reads So that says 13.6M illegal immigrants in 2024 and 20.7M in 2030, but that 2030 number uses a linear extrapolation of the 2021-2024 trend, but obviously something changed in 2025. This is less of a projection and more of a what if the current trend continues, which they say in another footnote. This is based in assumptions that I fund to be dubious. It is assumes that illegal immigrants will vote Democrat by a large enough margin to move the vote nanny. That may not be the case. Ostensibly the only policy point this group of people (illegal immigrants) should be united on is immigration. If immigration policy suddenly became the thing that cost Republicans elections they would adjust their position to become more competitive. Immigration isn't inherently a liberal or conservative issue. Some people in this thread said the immigration reform bill proposed by Democrats last year and sunk by Republicans was only done to compete with Trump on this issue in the election. If there was an advantage to be gained in the future by being pro-immigration because large numbers of illegal immigrants gained voting rights and this issue was important to them we would see a similar adjustment by Republicans. If the nanny policies of the Democratic party are as disastrous as the Trump administration makes them sounds then the nanny state should not be able to last for very long. As things fail Republicans should be able to use these failures to sway voters to their side. This assumes not only that illegal immigrants will vote preferentially for Democrats, but that this voting preference will be maintained by the progeny of the illegal immigrants. This is speculative since political party affiliation often differs between parent and child. There are many generations of immigrants living in this country right now and the Republican party has not had trouble convincing enough of their progeny to maintain a competitive landscape with the Democrats up to this point. They will adjust as needed to do the same in the future. I don't think the Republican party really believes that this is actually the plan of Democrats. They are more using it to try and consolidate support behind their immigration policy. Scare other Republicans into thinking this is a more important issue than it actually is. If they were really afraid of the eventuality of nanny state tyranny as a result of immigrants tilting the balance, then why would Trump be so keen to add 40M Canadians and another 60k Greenlanders to the US voting population? Both constituencies are more liberal than US voters. If this ultimately benefits Democrats I believe such benefits are incidental to their policy and not the result of some decades long plan to replace voters with immigrants. It would take to long to get any payoff and politicians are more short sighted. They have to be with election cycles every 2-6 years.

Supposing the net effect of apportionment was a wash - no net benefit for either party within the measurement uncertainty. What would you expect two independent assessments to come up with? If there is a high degree of confidence in the population numbers both of total residents and illegal immigrants in each state then they should come up with the same answer, but there is a fairly large uncertainly attached to the illegal immigrant count so they might differ, but the answers would be consistent within the uncertainty of each analysis. Not really. You found two tables of conclusions based on data and ignored the one that showed no net change. A more even handed assessment of the results would be exactly what I said earlier that is unclear that either party benefited or a possible slight benefit for the blue states. A gain of 1 seat is a very marginal and less than what is typically accomplished through other political manipulation in the process such as gerrymandering.

So when the count was performed in 2020 under the Trump administration the Census Bureau ostensibly underestimated the population of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas and overestimated the population of Hawaii, Delaware, Rhode Island, Minnesota, New York, and Massachusetts. This was discovered by the Census bureau in 2022 operating under the Biden administration via the Post Enumeration Study. What does this say about who does the counting?