chasfh

Welcome in from the cold.

Which is why anyone who votes for him would vote for him, since they don’t want him to work with the other party. Their goal is to destroy government from within and steal all the money on the way out.

I assumed the whole sacrificing-babies-and-drinking-their-blood thing was just another projection.

It makes no sense until you consider the intellectual level of their constituency.

I think you're onto something. I'd think it is very possible that pitchers, and players in general, overtrain, perhaps making them more vulnerable to injury.

Increased Pitch Velocity Is Associated With Throwing Arm Kinetics, Injury Risk, and Ulnar Collateral Ligament Reconstruction in Adolescent, Collegiate, and Professional Baseball Pitchers: A Qualitative Systematic Review: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36649827/

The most convincing research I've seen has concluded it's the quest for more velocity.

It's a symbiotic thing: the fans treat the World Series as the main thing that matters, and the media promote the World Series as the main thing that matters. It's not that one is to blame for the other. They each spring organically from perception and incentives, and they feed each other equally. But in any event, it is the reason the best record in the regular season is considered practically meaningless without corresponding postseason success.

I'm in Washington, PA, passing through, and at the hotel I picked up the local paper (the Observer-Reporter) and they had a story about the gag order, below the fold on page whatever, and within the article there was a thumbnail picture of the judge who issued it, Tanya Chutkan, and I thought, man, this newspaper wants their readers to know what this lady looks like, for some reason ...

What will happen if the vote is a mostly-Democratic majority with Republican holdouts to certify another Biden win? Will Jim Jordan declare the vote to be a rigged fraud and then a bunch of red hat reps storm the Democratic cloakroom and hang Don Bacon in effigy?

As long as elections are free and fair and the media is not clamped down, fascism will usually lose.

Nice rig. I love hearing the soft whir of an electric engine versus the aggressive rumble of an IC. For one thing, it makes the music sound better at lower volumes!

I'd've thought it'd've been more clever to try to finagle the blame onto Democrats than just blowing up democracy, but you might have it the right way around!

You will probably disagree then with my contention that people cannot think and act as a collective unit in the best interests of the group, but only as a collection of discrete individuals responding to individual incentives irrespective of the best interests of the group. In that way, whole populations can for the most part be manipulated by smart actors—themselves acting as a collective unit rather than as a collection of discrete individuals—that can utilize deep institutional learning of sociological and psychological techniques that, even if a tiny number of targeted individuals might have the same knowledge, certainly cannot be answered or even matched by the targeted whole collection of discrete individuals. We are seeing that accelerate all throughout the world in real time, and once those smart actors master AI as a tool for such manipulation on a mass 1:1 scale, it's likely all over for the rest of us. Our only choice at that point will be the choice to side with the oppressors or side with the rest of us.

I don't think it is driven by that at all. I'm not willing to blame consumers for the ****ty products the corporate powers that be deign to offer them, any more than I blame voters for electing incompetent people when the only practical choices they are given is Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum.

I am starting to wonder whether the real big picture on the whole shutdown sht is not that they are trying to get Democrats to take the blame for it, but whether they want to destroy America by making citizens throw their hands up at how terrible government is and get them to stop caring and give up on democracy and voting altogether. Then they can scheme other ways to take and keep power, ways that perhaps strike them as a whole lot more interesting and a whole lot more fun.

I think the reason people resent it in baseball is because it doesn't happen in the other sports. In the NFL a wild card might win a Super Bowl, but they almost always have division-winning-level records, like 11-5 and 12-4, not 9-7. And the 9-7 teams who do go to the Super Bowl have won their divisions, so in a sense, they "earned" their way there. The 2007 football Giants won the Super Bowl as a 10-6 wild card team, probably the closest analog for a potential Diamondbacks champion, and maybe people talked about what a travesty that was, I don't remember. In the NBA, the higher-seeded teams almost always wins because there's hardly any luck involved in that sport. Better teams practically always beat worse teams. As it so happens, the 2022-23 Miami Heat, who went 44-38, were the first team lower than a 6-seed to go to the NBA Finals in a full season, and they got smoked by the Nuggets 4-1. In the NHL a team is probably a lot more likely to advance as an 8-seed to the Cup finals because a lot depends on how hot your goalie is. The 2012 Kings didn't even win half their games and hoisted the Cup as an 8-seed. But America doesn't like hockey, so nobody cares.

And the schtick, like the stupid bit on the horse, because Texas cowboy I guess.

I have a working theory about this: there has been a concerted, probably at least loosely-collaborative effort to push down the quality of goods and services across the board for at least a couple decades, through the relentless cutting of costs to maximize profits and shareholder value, and to condition the buying public to simply accept that quality is getting worse while we continue to pay the same for everything as before. And then, when they introduce a product that replicates the quality of what we used to get on an everyday basis, they can promote it as a premium product and charge a premium price for it. I put this in the political forum because I really do believe government has the power to hold corporate America's feet to the fire by regulating the optimization of product and service quality on behalf of the American public, but everybody in government is making way too much money from corporations to be motivated to do so, so why bother.

I don't think it's a case of the entire center-right media/pundit class not knowing how Republican elected officials will act, as much as they absolutely know privately, but they opine differently in public, because their team's ideological orthodoxy demands they do so. They can't say what they know is the truth before the fact because their media base won't stand for it, and there would be a price they would pay for it. But flip side, that's perfectly OK, because when reality arrives to proves their punditry was wrong, nobody on their team holds them accountable for it, mass amnesia sets in, they reset the past to fit the present, and they barrel on into the future to do it again and again.

This kind of thing has been said many times and in many ways, but here's another: Three of the four teams left won only 90 games during the regular season, and the fourth team won only 84. All five teams with more wins are no longer in the playoffs.

See, now even here he sounds reasonable, maybe because he's not calling people names or making vague threats or disparaging entire classes of people. The best outcome we can hope for is a crazy person who turns everyone off for the next year but doesn't actually accomplish anything substantial in his role.

He was the perfect guest host at the right time, since he could speak from a position of authority on the effects of terrorist attacks on the people left behind.

I might actually be much more worried if a hardcore red hat who does not have visible personality problems—someone who comes off looking statesman-like—were to get the Speakership and then could prosecute all these culture war items successfully and look reasonable doing it. Somebody like, I don’t know, Mike Rogers—a guy who gives lip service about working with Democrats while he votes to overturn the election, and calls for the impeachment of DAs prosecuting Trump, and opposes spending bills that contain “extreme socialist initiatives”, as if there were even such a thing. That’s the guy I would be much more worried about than Jim Jordan or even Steve Scalise.

Ever get back on your feet? 😉