Routine Revelations

Last year on this date the Chicago Cubs had a 32-35 record and would go on to a 83-79 record and finished 10 games behind Milwaukee in the NL Central. Right now they have a 41-27 record, are in first place in the NL Central and lead St. Louis by 5 games. The Cubs currently have the second best record in the National League and fourth best in the the MLB.

People complain about the TSA at the airports all the time, and some of those people might remember a time when there was no TSA and one could even walk to an airport gate without a ticket. Do you want the TSA on every street in America? That is what is coming, although in a more armored form. Every democrat ought to be warning us that this thing most people do not like, the TSA, is going to be much worse in the coming months.

Do those people who call themselves Second Amendment “believers” not realize that one of the reasons why southern states wanted the second amendment is because they feared the federal takeover of state militias, which we now call the national guard? In other words, they demanded the right to bear arms because they feared a president would do the exact thing Donald Trump has done in California. If you truly believe in the Second Amendment, or for that matter the Constitution and Bill of Rights, you should be opposed to what Trump has done.

Hey, it’s Windows 95 all over again. What’s old is new.

I don’t understand the definition of a sell out at a Major League Baseball game. My definition would that every seat is occupied, but that can’t be true because the Tigers say the weekend series against the Cubs sold out every game and yet on Friday night I saw entire blocks of empty seats in the upper deck, left field corner. Sure, there are going to be empty seats as people don’t show up, but entire rows? Not to mention the many empty seats right behind home plate. Something doesn’t compute. I know they are talking ticket sales, but with the paperless tickets and scanning it should be able for stadiums to have actual attendance

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.