State of the Discussion

Only one of the "new" rules I despise is the starting extra innings with a "ghost runner" on 2nd base.

It has had the desired effect of avoiding marathon extra inning games, but it's a cheap finger-on-the-scale type of change that betrays the spirit of the sport. You are suppose to earn your way on base.

The fact that they don't implement the rule during the playoffs is a clear admission that the concept is BS.

MoveOn.org was a website created in the days following the Clinton impeachment.

It tweaked the whole preoccupation with CONSENSUAL sex between Presidents and interns on the part of thrice-divorced Republicans and otherwise mocked the whole pretense to "Family Values".

The movie "Jennifer's Body" includes some snappy dialog where one character tells another character to "Move On Dot Org."

On the day of (or maybe the day after) October 7th, a plucky young Ivy Leaguer tweeted out "What did you think decolonization would look like? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers."

I mashed all of these together in the hopes that it would point out what a post-Family Values Republican Party would look like. It was intended to be a humorous post but also one with bite because it's also supposed to accurately, if unflatteringly, describe the state of affairs.

We had 80yrs of inefficiency that made the game lively *and* HR friendly.

Since then we've seen batting averages drop 30 points, strikeouts/game go from 2.5 to 8.5 and walks go up by 1/game and HR go up 1/game. While the total runs per game is exactly the same at 4.39 (odd coincidence between 1920/2024 - but variance is low)

Which is just to say that we've optimized for Walks/Strikeouts/HR at the expense of putting balls in play.

One small bright side is that making the bases 3" larger increased stolen bases per game by 50%... which puts it on the higher side in the ebb/flow of SB over time.

That why I started with 'lower the mound' ... the biggest 'bad' trend in baseball is the Strikeout. The overall bad trend is fewer balls in play - which makes the game less interesting to watch... overall. But yes, HR are fun and if we lowered the mound without doing anything else? We'd get even more of them and more walks.

So... expand the parks, keep the ball lively and batted around the park more and lets see what happens.

Otherwise it's just the long march of Earl Weaver through the baseball institutions.

I am usually a traditionalist on matters of sport but have found myself agreeing that the rule changes are good. Attention spans are what they are and I feel a lot better taking my kids to games, confident that we will actually make it through the whole thing, which is convenient for me since otherwise I'd make it to fewer than half as many games a year.

Anyway I am also excited for the season. I'll also be hoping my O's can finally turn the corner in the playoffs, but we have many months before it's time to start getting worked up about that subject.

"That hitters were unwilling or unable to do that is part of the problem."

Should've lowered the mound instead.

Just not sure what to do with Three True Outcomes baseball. If I'm being serious and waving a magic wand? Need to make the ballparks bigger.

More ground to cover for fielders and fewer homeruns = more hits on contact... and if every ball can't be launched for a HR... then also lower the mound to address strikeouts. But, we all know what the chicks think about the longball.

But I do like the pitch clock and ending the OCD batter rituals.

North: ...billions ... requires you loop in the foundation which was regularly audited and found to be above board.

No, it was found to be "legal", as in, "we can't prove anything illegal in court".

The Husband of the Secretary is State is accepting Billions of dollars from states She deals with professionally. This money is used to promote her political agenda and influence.

The entities that were giving the money don't normally do this. These entities entirely stopped giving money the moment she lost power.

All of this was "legal", meaning with marital communications being privileged we have to trust there's no connection. Much like kindergarteners accept that Santa exists.

Pointing to this and claiming "it was above board" takes us to willful ignorance. I fully admit everything that happened was not-provably-illegal-in-court, but that's not the line that most of the electorate uses to decide if there's a problem.

So if you're wondering why Team Red can be expected to back their guy even though the group chat was obviously illegal, a big part of that is we had the Clintons showcase for years just what Washington ethics looks like.

And we also had for that same period of time Team Blue declare in lockstep that this kind of thing should be ignored.

When I was about 5, we lived about a block from a corner grocery (which have sadly disappeared in this city). My mom sent me there to buy some buns, either hamburger or hot dog, and I bought the wrong one. I had to bring them back and the storekeeper yelled at me. That happened 55 years ago!

I also remember it being at the end of the earth. I went back just a few years ago, and you could see the store from our back porch.

But the rule against the shift is awful. There's a non-fiat solution: go the other way. That hitters were unwilling or unable to do that is part of the problem.

The Clintons certainly been portrayed as corrupt and I don't deny the Clintons behaved in a manner that didn't weaken those allegations. But being proven in court is, ya know, kind of a big thing. Especially when you throw around the billions number which, let's be clear, requires you loop in the foundation which was regularly audited and found to be above board. So, you're saying the allegations about the Clintons make then the most "openly corrupt politicians of their generation" even above politicians actually found guilty of corruption or politicians legally banned from operating, say, charitable foundations or educational institutions? Like our current President? Most corrupt in their generation? Please.

But, on the other hand, the Clintons are happily done and gone from the political scene with no successors or new candidates so I don't
see much juice left in wrangling over them. But the Signal chats' very existence is assuredly wildly illegal (because it's so insecure) even before we get into the fact that the nimrods invited in a journalist by accident. And it's much more wildly illegal than Clintons server was found to be.

Always worth remembering that no Clinton has held office for 12 years or run for any office in nearly 10. Love them or hate them one can fairly ask what the statute of limitations is on the Clintons. 2030? 2040? Whenever they're both dead?

First, your timeline is completely backwards since the pardons under Bill Clinton came a decade and change before the private server so unless HRC was time travelling the one couldn't have been in the service of the other.

Second, I simply am pointing out how you keep descending into talking about speculative or perceived Clinton crimes in response to genuine, convicted and materially factual right wing crimes.

I don't need to claim the Clintons are pure as the driven snow to observe that their the vast majority of their alleged crimes exist, overwhelmingly, as a matter of right wing spin and imagination and that is not, remotely, equivalent to crimes by their right wing counterparts that have been tried in court, convicted and sentenced.

Last thing on Snow White for a while. The kid of one of the producers blames Zegler.

To be perfectly honest, he has a point but there is plenty of room to make lots of points. Sure, Zegler was vaguely offputting in some of her interviews but how many people even know about those?

Hell, the movie has some vaguely of-the-moment politics in it but that's something that people who see it walk out of the movie scratching their heads over, not something before the fact.

The problem, if I had to guess, was that the trailers sucked and the dwarves were more likely to make you say "you're kidding, right?" instead of "holy cow, this looks awesome". The trailers were just enough to get people to say "maybe I'll read a review first..." and the official critic reviews are at 42% on Rotten Tomatoes (which means there's a good chance that the movie reviewer in your local paper gave it a poor grade) and Letterboxd has it at 2.2.

The trailer made people hesitate, the reviews told them that they were right to do so.

Now, with that said, is it possible to put lipstick on a pig? Yes! Disney used to be good at that! And the lipstick process does involves stuff like not being offputting in carpet interviews and not posting "Free Palestine" to your social media in such a way that is as likely to get people to say "that's not a message to her millions of fans, that's a message to two or three very specific people in front of her millions of fans" as to get them to say "from the river to the sea! But I won't see a movie with Gal Gadot in it because she was in the Israeli Military!"

We're in the "finger-pointing and recriminations" part of the post-release now. Not the "it didn't do that bad, all things considered" part.

RE: speculative tea leaf reading about unsubstantiated crimes the Clintons are alleged to have committed to somehow

So we're supposed to pretend she wasn't caught (legally) selling pardons?

Marc Rich's wife gave a million or so dollars to HRC's campaign when she badly needed it. Bill gave Marc a pardon.

People as far to the Left as Jimmy Carter have pointed out that there was no reason for the pardon other than the money. And there was no reason for the money other than the pardon.

This didn't rise to the level of "provably illegal in court" which is apparently her personal ethical standard.

That's why the Clintons were constantly being investigated and also why we constantly found we didn't have enough evidence for a criminal conviction.

You say that like it'd be a good thing. Far as I can tell it's only Trump's political opponents who are upset with him and we just had elections. If the system allows/requires elections every 5 months then the gov is so unstable that there will be serious problems.

We had an election and decided to let the clowns rule for a while. Elections have consequences. I don't like it, but the rules say this is what happens.