Mariners about to lose a big advantage they rarely capitalized upon | Hot Stone League | Seattle Times
Baseball has some weird inequities (which are different from the big, troubling inequities like one team having a nearly $200-million payroll and another, in the same league, having a payroll under $40 million). I’m talking about stuff like the wild-card schedule, in which teams in the same league, and even division, competing for the same prize, can have wildly divergent caliber of opponents, depending on whom they happen to draw in the wild card that year. And also the fact that teams in one division — the six-team NL Central — have to beat out five foes to win the title, while teams in another division — the four-team AL West — only have to beat out three.
Yet somehow, in the 17 full seasons since baseball went to the three-division format in 1994, taking the White Sox, Royals and Twins out of the AL West and moving them into a newly formed AL Central, the Mariners have capitalized the least from the reduced competition. They have three titles (in 1995, 1997, and 2001), compared to five for the Angels (2009, 2008, 2007, 2005 and 2004), five for the Rangers (2011, 2010, 1999, 1998 and 1996), and four for the A’s (2006, 2003, 2002 and 2000).
Now, by all indications, their divisional advantage (and the disadvantage of the six teams in the NL Central) is about to come to an end. Ever since it came out earlier this year that Bud Selig was eyeballing some tweaks to the playoff system and division alignment — an extra wild-card team in each league, and a switch to six five-team divisions — it has been obvious that the end is near for the four-team AL West.
The only question was which team would switch from the National League to the American League, and it quickly became apparent that there were two prime candidates: the Arizona Diamonbacks and the Houston Astros. If the Diamondacks moved, obviously another team — probably the Astros — would have had to move to the NL West to balance things out. Now it’s becoming even more apparent that it’s going to be the Astros, who are in the process of being sold to businessman Jim Crane. . It appears that part of the deal will be a switch of the Astros to the AL West, which is a mixed blessing for them. The Astros reportedly don’t like the idea of playing so many road divisional games in the Pacific time zone. On the other hand, the idea of a divisional rivalry with the cross-state Rangers is enticing. At any rate, the well-connected Peter Gammons tweeted yesterday that “Houston ownership change expected to go through in mid-November, w/ AL move.”
The Houston Chronicle has a story today saying that nothing has been finalized on either the sale or realignment front. But I’m hearing that it has a good chance of happening as Gammons tweeted. However, it’s very unlikely the Astros would join the AL West next season; not with the 2012 schedule already out.
The change would likely take place for 2013, meaning that the Mariners may have just one final chance to exploit their four-team division. Yes, the Astros, at 56-106, were one of just two teams to finish with a worse record than the Mariners last year (the Twins were the other). But the Tigers lost 119 games in 2003 and were in the World Series in 2006. Fortunes change, but it’s a mathematical reality that beating out four teams will be harder than beating out three.
The Board of Deputies have done the unthinkable: urged Britain’s leaders to establish a Palestinian state.
Why on earth would the Board of Deputies advocate for establishing yet another radicalized Arab state, this one just a bike-ride away from Israel’s airport which is frequented by so many British Jews (and their Israeli friends and relatives)?
Also, where are the voices of the pro-Israel groups which have BOD representatives, such as Bnei Akiva UK and Emuna UK, among other groups?
Some background which might help make the unbelievable believable. It seems that the history of the Board of Deputies can only be characterized as “not always having been a peaceful one either in its relations with the world at large or (even) within the British Jewish community”. In no small part this was due to the BOD’s regressive attitude to Palestine-Israel.
Zionism raised its head in the late 19th century, but British Chief Rabbi Hermann Adler, who served from 1891-1911, set the tone for the BOD of that time by being a ‘staunch opponent of political Zionism’ who denounced the historical First Zionist Congress as ‘an egregious blunder’. Even whatever Zionist sympathies there were, furthermore, did not make their way into any official BOD events and statements.
In 1915, the BoD’s “Conjoint Committee”, with affiliates, denounced Jewish nationalism as ‘reactionary’ and demanded that the Jews in Palestine retract from the Zionist program, their insistence on establishing a Jewish state. In 1917, the same BoD Committee published a statement in the general British press which attacked Zionism, speaking (they said) for all of British Jewry. The letter caused furious protest from Lord Rothschild, Chaim Weizmann and others, while other prominent British Jews supported the BoD’s attack on Zionism. Historian Stuart A. Cohen, claimed that this fiasco was not primarily over the question of Zionism, having at least as much to do with the Board’s undemocratic structure. It is noteworthy that even today, in the Internet era, the identity of nearly all of the Deputies appears to be secret and their contact particulars are certainly not made available to the public.
Edwin Montagu, the British Jewish Minister for India agreed with the BOD’s pro-Palestine/Israel critics in one thing: that the Board had an autocratic character. However, as a vehement anti-Zionist, he accused Zionism of being a foreign import, differentiating (as did many opponents of Israel or Palestine) between Jews merely resident in Britain, and those of British birth, stressing that the latter were opposed to Zionism. Montagu said that any British government favoritism toward a Jewish national home would be ‘a cruel blow by the many English Jews who love England’ – as opposed to those English Jews who, in his view, did not “love England” (i.e. did not love Montagu’s own policies). Despite this, Britain’s Foreign Secretary did miraculously ask Rothschild and Weizmann rather than Montagu to submit a formula for establishing a Jewish national home, and the rest is history.
BoD Chairman Sir Stuart Samuel did timidly dispute Montagu’s insistence that British Jews opposed the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine – now Israel. Samuel said that actually, ‘a large majority’ of British Jews supported the establishment of a national home in Palestine, but made very sure to keep this evaluation confidential i.e. out of the hands of the public.
Once the famous Balfour Declaration had issued, Lord Montagu denounced it and his own Government which had “dealt an irreparable blow to Jewish Britons and … endeavoured to set up a people which does not exist’. Montagu also denounced the Zionists because ‘all my life’ he had been trying to ‘get out of the ghetto’ and the Zionists ‘want to force me back there’.
From the 1920s, Orthodox synagogues led the way to Israel’s establishment – i.e. to the development which is now an obvious boon to everyone. The Orthodox affiliated to the Zionist Federation, providing funds and other assistance for the Zionist movement.
In 1928, the United Synagogue, which was the most influential British Jewish body aside from the BoD itself established an official Zionist fundraising committee although the United S was, at the time, controlled by the non-Zionist Robert Waley-Cohen, who cleverly circumvented the United Synagogue council by various ‘legal manoeuvres’, and managed to delay Zionist fundraising for two years.
In 1936 Nahum Goldmann began urging the BoD to join the World Jewish Congress as British affiliate. He was unsuccessful – the BoD feared being thought of as possessing “dual loyalty”, desired to protect its own particular access to government, and refused Goldmann’s overture for almost 40 years (till 1974).
In 1937 the Zionists secured a majority on the BoD’s Palestine Committee. However it took until the 1940s for the BoD to decisively join the Zionist camp.
Only due to the horrors of the Holocaust, was resistance within the BoD to Zionism finally overcome in the 1940s. First, a Zionist was elected as BoD president, unopposed, in 1940 (Selig Brodetsky), defeating his non-Zionist predecessor Robert Waley-Cohen. In 1943, Zionists achieved a majority at the Board. In 1944, almost 5 decades after the first Zionist calls, the BoD finally endorsed the call to establish a Jewish state. Even then, Non-Zionists like Neville Laski tried in 1948 to remove Brodetsky but fortunately were not successful. In 1946 BoD with the Poale Zion campaigned against the British government’s shocking Palestine policy, but had difficulty finding Jewish MPs willing to speak out despite “desperate” lobbying efforts.
In 1949, Israel’s first president wrote his autobiography. He had harsh words for the Board of Deputies, which, he said “consisted of old-fashioned, well-to-do assimilationist Jews who looked upon Judaism as a collection of abstract religious principles… and upon Zionism as, at best, the empty dream of a few misguided idealists”.
At a Board of Deputies dinner in 2007, Gordon Brown reportedly promised “Israel will always have our support …and we will never compromise our friendship for political expediency”.
Harry Sacher boldly warned anti-Zionist Lucien Wolf of the Board of Deputies, back in 1914, that if the BoD or any other communal organisation opposes Zionism, ‘we shall, however reluctantly, do what within us lies to destroy any authority they may claim in Jewry or beyond to Jewry to speak for the Jewish people’. Will any Jews in Great Britain today, prominent or otherwise, take the BoD to task even minimally for having the audacity and shortsightedness to officially support a Palestinian state on the outskirts of Tel-Aviv, of all things, and so short a time after the Manchester massacre, to boot?
The people of Gaza are the punching bag of the Middle East, they live in a highly dense area with no prosperity plan at all. But it’s not because they can’t or because they don’t have enough money donated by the world it is because they are used and abused by the league of Arab nations and the UN as a front post for their causes.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the settlements were evacuated but they left behind a booming agriculture machine that was responsible for 60% of Israel’s organic export of vegetables and the majority of export of flowers to Europe. Israel left behind hundreds of greenhouses that were ready for planting. Take a seed plant it in the ground and within three months you can export lettuce and other vegetables, it works I was there to see it with my own eyes. Funding for seeds and greenhouses were donated by Jews in Manhattan in the sum of 14 million dollars. The day Israel left all the greenhouses were destroyed and the money was used to start digging a tunnel. A year and three months later Gilad Shalit was kidnapped.
Civilians that are pawns in a sum zero battle that leads to nowhere. Thousands are still living in refugee camps that were supposed to be dismantled but are kept alive by the UN and different organizations to increase the pain and suffering of the civilians of Gaza. A refugee camp in its nature is supposed to give refuge from oppression, the great irony is that 9 years after they govern themselves they still seek refuge form their own regime. But there is a reason for that and that is because the Hammas came promising the end of corruption and prosperity for the land of Gaza. What the civilians didn’t know is that they are used and abused again by a murderous terror organization that will turn their lives into hell having the civilians seek refuge once again.
Hammas turned Gaza into one big army base and any terror act against Israel was accompanied by a shield of civilians and by having groups of school kids abused in instructing them to surround a rocket launch sites in order to prevent Israel from retaliating. These are facts that are documented numerous times, in films and personal testimonies.
This operation has a dual purpose to protect the people of Israel and it is also designed to protect the civilians of Gaza from being abused once again by the Hammas.
The voice that has to come out which is true and backed by Arab countries such as Egypt and Saudis, is that a terror organization has taken over Gaza just like ISIS took over Mosul in Iraq and they are using the civilians in Gaza to protect their terror regime. The IDF is liberating this region to give back to the Gaza people the life and dignity they deserve. Anyone who objects to this mission is sentencing the civilians of Gaza to many more years of tyranny and poverty, hate and refugee camps.
Gaza can turn into a Singapore of the Middle East but not with the Hammas there. Any one that cares about human lives, and wants freedom for the people of Gaza, should voice this opinion. They need hospitals to be hospitals and not a terrorist bunker. They need schools to be schools and not to be a rocket launch site, and they need beaches to be beaches that are safe for children to play and swim and not turn it into factories for war heads. Nations should support the freedom of the Gaza people now by supporting this mission to eradicate terror in Gaza.
At this moment they are blocking the roads while people that are wounded seek medical treatment at the field hospital erected by the IDF at the Erez boarder. They are preventing humanitarian aid to go into Gaza. They are looting homes of people that left because of the crisis.
Gaza people have to be freed of these terrorists. They must live a normal life. This time Gaza people must free themselves from these terrorists they owe it to their children!
We are now fighting the war of Mahmud Abbas and of Egypt and sacrificing our boys to give the people of Gaza a better life. Cooperate with the IDF by evacuating the dense populated areas and let the army do its job, it will help you the people of Gaza in the long run. Will the people of Gaza be smart this time or will they fall into the same false hope of nationalism terror regime again, unfortunately I think the latter.
If just for once the international community will trust Israel and support its war on terror they will truly bring better life to the people of Gaza which suffered for their wrong choices. Does the international community really care about the civilians in Gaza or are they motivated by something else entirely, time will tell..
We call out to the international community give us one chance to liberate Gaza we owe it to the civilians living there.
Rabbi Oriel Einhorn is an eighth generation Jerusalemite who currently serves as the community of Kfar Shemaryahu. He got his rabbinical degree from the Har Etzion yeshiva, where he learnt for 10 years. He served as community rabbi in Hong Kong, China and Cape Town, South Africa before resettling in Israel and founding Kehillot- an organization which promotes communtiy building between Jews of all stripes. Enjoys gourmet cooking, golfing and extreme adventures.	
"In a world that is progressively growing smaller, in a region flourishing in beauty, creativity and challenges, Imagining our Future Together is not an exercise in utopia, but a courageous and creative attempt by the young artists of South Asia and by the World Bank to break barriers and stretch hands to reach common goals," said Marina Galvani, art curator for the World Bank.
A selection committee is reviewing the entries and will select the artworks for the exhibition. The winners will be announced in May.
The“Imagining Our Future Together” exhibition will be on display from October through December 2012 throughout the South Asia region and beyond (locations to be confirmed). During the exhibition cycle, the public will be invited to vote online for their favorite works of art. The artist whose artwork receives the most votes will be awarded a special prize.
A series of events in South Asia will take place to bring the selected art pieces and artists together so that they can network with other young people in the region and communicate their views about sharing a common future.
have you guys notified the selected artists..?? because the date of notification was 21st of may and is there any list of the selected artists ??
The artists who have been selected have been notified. All those who haven't received any emails regarding the selection have been rejected. The winners will be announced on the 4th of June in a special ceremony at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington DC along with the announcement of the special prize! Good Luck to the selected artists!