(I got into baseball as a child--I have told that story before--through listening to it on the radio. There are certain disadvantages to that method, one of which is that I don't know what a split-finger four-seam lightly tongued fastball looks like. Although Bugs Bunny was sort of a tutorial.)
... silent.
On the radio and TV, the audience gets both the play-by-play and incidental chatter meant to
And that's it. There's other information--batting order, strikes and balls, strikeouts, walks, doubles, scoring, the usual statistics. But silent.
I have to check that out again this evening.
Oh, and Cleveland won the first game. 6-0.
And now for sewer-side:
- Meta family structure and political/moral value beliefs. Doug Muder, from 2005, and still prescient.
- Echidne of the Snakes warns of the threat of the alt-right.
- Zandar Versus The Stupid on a deliberately-engineered glitch in Obamacare. (The Republican governors' non-expansion of Medicaid, that is, not the fact that healthy people aren't getting health insurance as much as unhealthy people are.)
Republican governors refusing to take money set aside to soften the blow for consumers through expanded Medicaid and health insurance companies bailing out of the single-plan market have largely succeeded in damaging the system in enough states to put the burden on shifting costs to premiums[...]
- Two-fer:
- Yastreblyansky:
That's really about it. I can't understand why he skips the obvious solution, which is monarchy. If you have a king then he can appoint all 30 or 40 of the nation's true conservatives to run the legal and governmental and cultural and intellectual establishments and the lack of votes isn't a problem, which completely eliminates the other problem, of meritocracy, in which liberals keep winning out just because they do better in their exams. Monarchy, and a judicious use of prison torture and capital punishment. And it's very alt-right, which is so fashionable just now.
- Driftglass:
Today was the day it began to dawn on H. Pecksniff Rosencrantz "Ross" Douthat III that he and every other card-carrying member of the professional Conservative Brain Caste really really suck at their job:
(See the post for the Douthat quotes, or go to the New York Times [linked in post] to get the full experience.)
[...]
What Mr. Douthat is trying gently suggest is that if Dubya hadn't lied American into the wrong war and hadn't fucked that war up something something New American Century!
What Mr. Douthat is desperately trying not to say is "Holy shit, the Left really was right about us smug little assholes all along!"
[...]
For the record, it has taken less than the gestation period of the average porcupine for Donald J. Trump (and that vengeful bitch Karma) to force both of the New York Times' highly-paid professional Conservative Public Intellectuals into clenched-teeth admissions that they have have never really had the slightest fucking clue as to what was going on inside the Conservative movement, the Republican party or America in general[.]
- ETA: Now three-fer: Susan of Texas (Hunting of the Snark):
The purpose of academia is to gain knowledge and pass it on to our young. Bureaucracies exist to run the business of governing, the entertainment industry exists to make money, and the legal establishment exists to create, maintain, and enforce a code of law. None of these organizations owe conservatives a living. If these organizations are meritocracies, moreover, then the cream will rise and the dregs will fall. The same conservative philosophies that glorify individual achievement and success through hard work and discipline should make whining for more power, money, and jobs a humiliating task. Sadly, however, Douthat is forced to admit that competence has a liberal bias.
(Ahem. It's called "reaping what one sows." A conservative value.)
Since, as Douthat admits, the conservative elite don't have enough brain or artistic power to succeed in lucrative and/or prestigious profession[s], they must depend on their base's power to get jobs. But once again, an impediment stands in their way. After yanking around, lying to, and ignoring their followers, the followers no longer trust their elite.
- Yastreblyansky:
- The ballot ( I vote absentee; there's usually a 50-50 chance I won't be here in November) for federal, state, and county offices and various propositions is four pages long, and the pages are approximately 11 x 17.
- Conspiracy satire, from Paul Bibeau.
It makes the Trumpkins crazy. The worst thing for a conspiracy theorist is to discover an actual fact. They go insane over it. It's like chumming the water around a few dozen tiger sharks. You give them a little bit of detail, and what happens? They're out there on Twitter and Facebook trying to convince their friends and family that every time John Podesta had a conference call it was so he could help the Fed put tracking chips in your Lucky Charms. They sound angry and unhinged, and the fact that their niece with the big H on her profile doesn't care makes them even more angry and unhinged. Nothing sells a seventh Clinton term like Trumpkins frothing and ripping their hair out.
- Pernicious is the word; more on voter suppression with loud cries over non-existent fraud. (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
- Bringing the day the Hollywood Walk of Fame is enclosed to a depth of 4 inches of plastic and requires airline-travel levels of security to visit closer: Vandal destroys Trump's Walk of Fame star. More details from Oliver Willis.
And as we all know perfectly well, The Gingrich Rules can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom where they were forged.
Driftglass. Because...
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