The Cubs beat the Nationals last night and in the game they hit the team’s 200,000 hit since the National League was formed in 1876. The Cubs are the first NL team to reach that mark.
I got Feedland running in my home lab, but why did I bother with it? Besides the obvious to find whether I can, one of the main reasons is to use it for managing my RSS subscriptions. Over time many of the sites I add to my subscription list stop being updated and it seems like a good idea to remove those sites from the subscription list and therefore cut down on the number of unnecessary updates being made by my feed reader. Feedland provides a nice view of all my feeds sorted by when they were last updated, so I can go to the bottom of the list and remove sites that haven’t updated in a year or more.
At least it’s not snowing.
Scott Alexander reminds us that 1.2 million Americans died due to COVID, and any way you cut it that is a lot of loss of life. He also seems at a loss for what could have been done differently. I think there is one thing that could have been done differently, one lesson that should be learned from COVID, which is that disasters are no place for politics. We must have a point at which we are willing to see there is a common enemy and work towards defeating it. In my opinion too many of those 1.2 million Americans lost their life because of people too caught up in the blame game and got ya politics.
As far as I can tell, little about the talk of the emerging AI “tools” is about their monthly cost. All of the good models cost at least $20 per month, which I think is too expensive and will create a digital divide. Some people are even paying $200 per month, which I just can’t comprehend!
Finished reading: Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas 📚
Clouds at sunset last night.
Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson are now deemed no longer banned from baseball by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, which means they can be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Whether they be elected is the real test of whether MLB accepts the hypocrisy that exists now that gambling has become a widely accepted across all sports.
In an article in The Atlantic titled “The Missing Branch” writer Yuval Levin explains how the weakness of Congress has lead to expansion of the executive and judicial branches. We seem to have forgotten that the founder’s solution to “no taxation without representation” was a two house Congress representing the people, the House of Representatives, and the states, the Senate. Congress is seat of the government, the President is there to execute the laws passed by Congress, and the Supreme Court is there to be sure the laws are within the bounds of the Constitution. Congress most important item of concern ought to be the preservation of its power to represent us, We The People, rather than making sure team Democrat or team Republican win.
The administration’s rationalization of an obvious emolument is just the latest example of their contempt for the Constitution. The unwillingness to be bound by the Constitution and the brazen circumvention is to me an impeachable violation of Trump’s oath of office. The Constitution does not give power, its purpose is to restrain power. The Constitution does not give rights to citizens (see the ninth amendment), it prevents the government from taking away rights. To me, the Constitution is clear, the administration cannot accept an emolument without an act of Congress no matter whether or not the giver is getting something in return.
The bullpen problems the Cubs had in their loss to the Mets yesterday is more of the same of the Hoyer era. Every season the Cubs rebuild their bullpen mostly from pitchers who were let go from other teams. When they do sign a free-agent reliever it is not when that person is at their prime but rather after their prime when they don’t command as high a salary. Hoyer’s plan for building a championship team is predicated largely on luck, but luck is not a strategy. No matter whether the Cubs win the division at the end of the season, Ricketts has only one question to answer and that is, based on his body of work, can Jed Hoyer build a consistently championship level competitive team? I think the evidence since 2017 is clear, he cannot and it is time for a change in direction.
An American Pope? Never expected to see the day. One of my best friends is excited that he is from Chicago and apparently a Cubs fan and they both got their Masters of Divinity from Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. I even spent a few nights at CTU the first time I ever traveled to Chicago on my own while my friend was still in school. The real important question though is the new Pope a fan of deep dish or thin crust pizza?
Spring is springing 🌱
I think this op-ed well describes what is being done to the republic of the United States of America. If Congress is going to act against the Presidency it needs to terminate the National Emergencies Act of 1976 via a joint resolution. It is this act that the Presidency is using to build its dictatorship. We, the citizens of the United States need to be constantly telling our representatives to pass this joint resolution for the sake of saving our ability to self rule. Rescinding this act ought to be the singular cause of all federal elections going forward.
The question Christians should start with is, why does the knowledge of good and evil lead to death? (Hint: It’s not about obedience.)
The Cubs have just completed the first series of the season against the Pirates winning two of three games, a disappointing result considering that is a match up between first and last place teams in the division. As I wrote before the series started I wanted to see the Cubs sweep the Pirates or win 2 of three at a minimum. Winning two of three is not playing down to the opponent but they should have won the game last night and completed the sweep today. Next up is a weekend series in Wrigley north against the second place Brewers starting Friday night on Apple TV (sigh). We will learn a little more this weekend by whether or not the Cubs win the series.
By most reports the Chicago Cubs wrapped up their toughest two weeks of the schedule last night and enter the first series against divisional opponent Pittsburgh with a 17-12 overall record and a 1.5 game lead in the N.L. Central. In short, they exceeded expectations. However, for me, the upcoming month against lesser opponents will be more telling. Will the Cubs play down to their competition, which has been a problem in the past, and end May with just a few games above .500 or will they extend their overall record to well above .500 by dominating the lesser opponents? Good teams beat the teams they are supposed to beat, and they are supposed to beat Pittsburgh so I am looking for a sweep or at least win the first two for a chance to sweep.
The song for today: Working For The Weekend
BTW, the topic of posts without titles is important to me because nearly all my posts don’t have titles. In my mind when I create a title for an item it is because there are multiple paragraphs and I think of it as an essay rather than a blog post. In fact, I have a category filter in micro.blog that automatically categorizes (or should but doesn’t seem to always run) any post with a title as an essay.
I continue to to tinker with Wordland whenever Dave does something new and I continue to be puzzled by why it is so tightly coupled with Wordpress. If it were me, Wordland would be a self hosted app for creating and maintaining an RSS feed and I would make consumption of that feed dependent on other, perhaps external, services. Right now Wordland does not add an item to the RSS feed until it is published to Wordpress, which is why I am confused by why Wordland has its own feed when all Wordpress sites also have a feed. Pointing to the Wordland feed puts an external dependency on Dave’s hosting.