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February 05, 2022

Top blogging for January

Between current and older posts, it was a baseball-heavy month as far as the most popular posts last month.

Tops? My hot take on Red Sox CEO Sam Kennedy using David Ortiz's induction into Cooperstown to make Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski into nonpersons.

Second? My scolding of a subset of the so-called Best Fans in Baseball™ for opening themselves to mockery by seriously thinking the Cardinals should sign Albert Pujols.

Third? My carefully showing that, even when just limited to this century, Shohei Ohtani's 2021 was nice but not all that.

Fourth? My callout of Jon Lester retirement fellation, especially when seemingly driven by Cubs homerism.

Fifth? My analysis of how blogsite Cooperstown Cred is as bad as Red Satan ESPN on a "Big Hall" mentality for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Sixth? From last month, explaining why, in detail, Gil Hodges isn't really a Hall of Famer.

Seventh, and we're out of baseball. I take the antivaxxers to task for their Nuremberg Code bullshit.

Eighth, my deep dive on bipartisan bullshit on the border in Tex-ass, along with the accumulating troubles of Kenny Boy Paxton.

Ninth? Similar to No. 6, explaining why, in detail, Tony Oliva isn't really a HOFer.

Tenth? Challenging liberals, and fellow leftists, to talk honestly about how they're going to juice up 100 million electric cars in the future without nuclear power.

February 04, 2022

I call bullshit on Blue Anon Texas freeze & snowpocalypse claims

(Sidebar: It's certainly possible that not all the "gotcha" was from Blue Anon Democrats, or from Democrats, period.)

First, without posting or embedding any Tweets, already Wednesday, I was seeing Tweets of totally empty shelves. Bullshit!

I live up on the Red, where, in the eastern half of Texas, this baby hit the hardest. My Tom Thumb had lines a-plenty at 2 p.m. Wednedsay, and shelves were thin in some places, but none of them were empty. NONE. I walked to my Walmart at 7 p.m. yesterday, and no empty shelves. NONE.

It's just as much bullshit as when the MAGAts were Tweeting #EmptyShelvesBiden a month ago, and after the initial run on toilet paper in the early days of COVID, or in response to the Trump Train a month ago, #BlueAnon was tweeting #EmptyShelvesTrump.

Political Twitter is more and more a puerile cesspool that would be even more damaging than Hucksterman's Meta-Fuckbook if it were the same size.

Second, I am embedding a Tweet to call bullshit on its author, Nick Wagner.

The bullshit, which is shown more in a thread of which that is just one post?

I quote-tweeted, and linked to the San Antonio Report story for which he shot the photos. Lindsay Carnett's story did NOT go down the "Gotcha Abbott" angle. It noted more clearly that the weatherization was NOT limited to temporary enclosures and was not even limited to the power plant per se. It also noted that some of the weatherization was summerization, not winterization. (She didn't note, which I did in the quote Tweet, that ERCOT is supposed to set summerization standards this spring.)

As for the temporary part? People who live up north note that this is just fine for a short-term need. And, it's San Antonio, not the Red. As I also said in my quote Tweet, overnight lows there were predicted to stay well above 20 last night, and are again tonight.

Third? Blue Anon of course invoked the name of Robert Francis O'Rourke, aka Beto, when talking about Strangeabbott, power supply and of course the Railroad Commission.

They ignored, or are ignorant of, even though the Trib wrote about it, as did Splinter Mag working off David Sirota, that, as a Congresscritter, a 2018 Senate candidate and a 2020 Prez candidate, that Beto took himself some oil and gas money, too, including from execs, not just rank and file.

And, folks, things like this are why I remain ... not a Democrat!

February 03, 2022

So, Spike Lee is making a new Kaepernick ESPN piece

The AP story about Spike Lee's plans for a docu-series on ESPN about Colin Kaepernick notes Lee's previous work about Kobe Bryant.

Well, we know right there that we're in the land of hagiography. Spike used one NBA game as his focus. Never covered any part of Bryant's personal life ... including "that incident" in Colorado.

Given that neither he nor Jemele Hill, also said to be involved, have ever said anything about Chinese human rights, Uyghurs, etc. and American Black athletes who refuse to comment on these issues, as half-right, but Palestinian-dissing Enes Kanter Freedom has noted in calling out LeBron James and others, don't expect anything but hagiography here either.

(Bob Costas, who in 2019 saluted Kaep and called out NFL hypocrisy, much more recently turned the tables and called out Kaep. Costas, a straight shooter who called out gun violence on halftime of a Monday Night Football game, knows his stuff. As for the provenance of that second link? Even though the Costas interview was on CNN, Google didn't show me any non-wingnut media embedding the video and doing a text extraction — and that includes CNN!)

As for Kaep's expressed desire to still play in the NFL? A semi-lie at best, per Stephen A. Smith calling out his fake tryout a year ago. He'd rather keep laughing all the way to the Nike bank and ignoring Uyghurs.

And, didn't Red Satan shove Jemele Hill out the door not too long ago, or at a minimum, didn't she sign off on leaving when ESPN put her in a narrow corridor facing an exit? I guess capitalism trumps wokeness. Actually, regular readers here will know that capitalism often CO-OPTS wokeness, and that wokeness is usually a willing, even eager participant in being co-opted.

Texas Progressives on the border and more

Off the Kuff looks at the developments in the SD10 redistricting lawsuit.

SocraticGadfly talks about the odiousness of antivaxxers blathering ignorantly about the Nuremberg Code, especially with the anniversary of the Wannsee Conference.

On immigration issues, per the excellent Border/Lines, it's ever more clear that #StatusQuoJoe is exactly that. Result? An exodus of executive branch young blood, led by Andrea Flores, even as oldsters like Ron Klain and Susan Rice, defend largely preserving the status quo.

Tex-ass now has both a battle and an issue on environmentalism. The battle? The feds have rejected the state's attempt to set a more lenient standard for ethylene oxide, a chemical key to production of household detergents and related items produced in Greater Houston (and southern Louisiana's) Cancer Alley. The issue? As known by many of us, and amplified in Winter Storm Uri, TCEQ shuts off pollution monitors in the face of severe weather.

Kenny Boy is trying to get the Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn its December decision that he cannot unilaterally prosecute election fraud allegations. And, he's jumped in bed not just with Steve Bannon but pillow guy Mike Lindell to push this. (That said, the Observer is wrong when it indicates just a few states have partisan judicial elections. While only seven states have partisan elections for their top courts, 18 do for lower courts, per Ballotpedia. In addition, of the 21 states with retention elections, in eight, the initial election after a gubernatorial appointment to fill a vacancy is a partisan election. In total, that's 26 of 50, more than half.)

Melinda Lucio could be the first woman executed in Texas since 2014 if SCOTUS doesn't do the right thing.

Alex Sammon asks just how much will Pelosi or others of the Democrat establishment go to the mat again this year for corruption-investigated Henry Cuellar? Sammon notes that Cuellar has a decade-plus history of ethics issues and violations. The Monthly has more, including that some third-party ad buys have dried up and that the San Antonie Express-News has endorsed Jessica Cisneros.

Who is Kandy Kaye Horn and why is she running for gov, and as a Rethuglican to boot? Not asked by the Monthly — will she and other minor candidates get just enough votes to push the race to a runoff? She appears to be as befuzzled in some ways as Kinky Friedman.

Mucus (THAT Mucus) and "furries." Click the link to learn more.

The first First Amendment lawsuit against Collin College for shit-canning a prof has concluded; Lora Burnett settled for OK money, and contra Collin's hack PR spox, it's a win not only for her, but for others suing the college; the settlement's not sealed and thus is admissible in their suits.

Grits for Breakfast looks at a time when the Austin Police Department removed lights and sirens from its police cars to encourage better driving by its officers.

The Current provides an oral history of the legendary punk band The Butthole Surfers' time in San Antonio.

Eric Berger cheers on the James Webb Space Telescope.

John Nova Lomax documents the Nicknamed Krogers of Houston. 

A federal judge has enjoined BNSF railway workers from going on strike. Check back on Feb. 8.

Greg Sergeant rightfully calls out Ruy Teixeira (and tho not named, the James Carvilles et al) in saying that Dems need to ignore "wokeness" entirely, and just shift that Overton Window.

February 02, 2022

Counterpunch uses Ukraine to go on kneejerk anti-nuke screed

The possibility of Ukrainian nuclear power plants becoming Russian bomb targets should full-fledged war break out is real. And worrisome. 

To pivot from that to saying Western Europe should already be weaning itself from fossil fuels, as does this screed at Counterpunch from anti-nuclear activist Linda Pentz Gunter, is either laughable or laughably ignorant.

See, that's already been happening, per Wikipedia. Germany? Nearly half its power from renewables. Romania and Finland above 40 percent. Sweden and Switzerland almost 60 percent and Denmark above that. Just about every country in Europe is above 25 percent and well above the US's 17 percent. (One notable exception is nuclear-heavy France.) Germany under Merkel started moving away from nuclear (albeit partially with domestic lignite) shortly after Fukushima and the Daiichi plant.

At the same time, Gunter, and I'm sure Beyond Nuclear in general, and not just in this article, refuse to deal with the issue of where the juice is going to come from to electrify our entire car and truck fleet.

Update: It did similar 2 weeks later, with this piece repeating typical non-skeptical leftist lies about Hiroshima.

In the bigger picture? Counterpunch has been getting more and more "uneven" in the past year or so and also moving more and more in the direction of "old Counterpunch."

Delilah Barrios is not for me; could that change? (No; post-Uvalde, that's even less likely)

I see myself more likely to not vote in the general election than pull the D lever for R.F. O'Rourke.

But, I'm pretty sure that I also won't be pulling the Green lever.

It used to be easier to nose around GOP and Dem state websites for this info. Not today. I couldn't even find "filed candidates" links or menus. The Greens do post candidates as straight news on the website. The Libertarians don't. 

I know already NOT TO VOTE for Green gubernatorial candidate Delilah Barrios, at least as of this moment. I have little love lost myself for Robert Francis O'Rourke, but if part of why she doesn't like Beto is "Attacks on 2nd Amendment rights," then I want nothing to do with her. First, even though he said he's not repudiating his "we're going to take your AK-47," he surely doesn't mean that 100 percent literally.

And, what if he did? I still believe in a "corporate" interpretation of the Second Amendment, with the "well regulated militia" clause governing. So did the Supreme Court, before Heller. And, an AK-47, at least on full auto, has zero non-military purpose. And, I don't give a fuck for what SCOTUS has said from Heller onward.

(Update, May 27: Sadly, shockingly and hypocritically, post-Uvalde, Barrios now is going with the angle that she'd be better than Beto on gun control. Well, you've pretty much guaranteed you've finished losing me. Just.Another.Politician.™

To add to the fun, one of Barrios' Twitter shills blocked me. Barrios had retweeted them, from a thread talking about the election, when this "Barcode" said, rhetorically, something about voting for either the blue NRA shill or the red NRA shill. Their account doesn't allow responses from the public, so I quote tweeted as saying that I knew Beto was a shill for Big Oil but not the NRA.

They then tweeted this in response:

Then blocked me. Fortunately, I got the screengrab off my Tweetdeck. I had quote-tweeted just before they blocked me, then, since I still had their tweet in Tweetdeck, tweeted to them directly, including calling them out for their failed attempt to be coy. Then, of course, I blocked them back. Actually, I did the Twitter double of both mute and block. And, like Barrios herself being hypocritical, just attempt at being coy is Just.Another.Politician.™ territory. With that, while reserving the right to undervote, I know I won't be voting for her and likely will for Bob on a Knob. I have no doubt that Libertarian nominee Dan Tippetts is going to be the typical Libertarian on gunz.

And now, she has finally responded to me on Twitter:

And, my reply:

That's the facts. 

She did respond back saying that she doesn't think gun control and "defund," whatever that increasingly vague idea means to her aren't mutually exclusive, but didn't back off her attack on Bob on a Knob:

I appreciate that she's going to "work on it," because, per this original post, and I'll probably put this stuff into a separate piece, her platform, as detailed, is a hot mess of inconsistencies, and that's not even counting her playing footsie with antivaxxers and wanting to let resident aliens vote. And, as for the "NRA donates to both parties"? Per Open Secrets, the gold standard on such, if less than 1 percent but technically more than zero is "donates to both parties," uh, WRONG. Again, per your shill, Bob on a Knob is a Big Oil shill. NOT an NRA shill.)

I Tweeted her Wednesday night to ask exactly what she means. If I have it before this goes live, you'll get it. And, as of late Thursday night, as I finished this up, she hadn't responded, though a liberal Democrat friend had retweeted it. That said, if David Bruce Collins is part of her campaign staff, I would think he saw the tweet, or else, this one:

And, it's meant. And, her platform makes this more clear. Yet elsewhere, in one of these candidate questionnaire forms, she says she wants more restrictions on the gun purchasing process and that she supports the buyback of assault weapons. And, she supports a MANDATORY buyback. She wants people on the no-fly list banned from buying guns. So, we're in the land of either actually foolish inconsistency, or one of hypocrisy. Either that, or she's trying to play a Dollar General version of 11-dimensional chess with Bob on a Knob or something, or thinks she is.

Scratch that. The "I Side With" is confusing, and I was thinking these were here own policies, beyond what her official platform says, that it had "scraped" from elsewhere, rather than what it says her expected voting base feels. In looking for what it claims she actually said, it has nothing.

Her own platform? She's a blank check 2nd Amendment-er. A "no exceptions" 2nd Amendment-er, like a no-exceptions pro-lifer. Yes, that analogy is deliberate.

And she is a nut otherwise.

It looks like Barrios is also an antivaxxer or fellow traveler, as well as a gun nut of fellow traveler.

Having seen other dissident Greens spew scads of misinformation over this issue, I suspect she does, too. The link she posts is full of other nuttery, with claims that the likes of COINTELPRO infiltrated the GP's Steering Committee. I did check yesterday on her Twitter to see if she's supporting the so-called Canadian truckers strike. As of now, she' not; that said, she's not a prolific Tweeter, and who knows what her thoughts are off-Twitter on the issue.

Update: Elsewhere in her platform, in another inconsistency, she supports a federal mask mandate. Even worse, she supports a federal vax mandate on large businesses! Yes, you read that right!

(Other "dissident Greens" are touting, of course, ivermectin and HCQ, and of course, even more stereotypical Green claims like vitamins and herbs.) With Barrios being a health care professional, though exactly in what capacity (a CNA can be a "health care professional") if she's in agreement with this quackery, it's worse yet.

And, no, vax mandates aren't racist. Hours of operation may not be perfect, but when Walmart and your local grocery story have been offering vaccines for a year, Blacks and Browns have had opportunity. As for the "indemnified pharmaceutical industry"? That saved it from being bankrupted by autism-pseudoscience antivaxxers.

And, other things on that link are just weird, like wanting to let non-citizen foreign nationals vote in US elections? Even EU countries, in general, don't allow that. They'll let resident foreigners vote in European Parliament elections, but not national ones.

Or wanting to increase H1 type visas, which American big biz uses to cut pay? You can't consistently support labor that way.

Or self-contradicting on eminent domain, opposing it when the phrase "eminent domain" is used, but supporting it when the concept is used.

Or supporting vaccine passports in that survey, while now attacking the GP's Steering Committee. 

Or supporting Bitcoin as legal currency, which anybody with brains knows is a libertarian wet dream of undermining actual government currencies.

All scratched as coming from that "I Side With" and therefore unclear if its based on anything she's said. That said, her platform itself, not the "I Side With," DOES link to this "The People's Manifesto," which I take as being endorsed by her. I'll single out one thing on "indigenous rights." Some indigenous people, like the Utes, LIKE oil drilling. You gonna tell them they can't?

The rhetorical question at the end of the updated header probably won't come true.

February 01, 2022

Coronavirus week 95: Antivaxxers hook up with fascists

Orac has a long read (aren't all of his?) about how COVID has shown fascists (and Proud Boys count as the real deal in AmeriKKKa) have become a bigger and bigger part of the antivaxxer world. He notes this probably started with a California state law in 2015 banning most non-medical vaccine exemption claims for kids. There had been a libertarian strain up until then, but it was more the greenie-, or Greenie-type woo of toxins, etc., he notes.

With that, it shifted to "personal autonomy," "bodily freedom" etc.

Hold on to that, though.

More and more actual Greens have adopted more and more of this language. It's then being steeped and fermented with the toxins idea, plus the "capitalism" claim of some Greens. Not all Greens who decry capitalism are ecosocialists or even close. Many are some sort of communitarian types, or wannabes, who think that at least partial opting out of capitalistic society, rather than moving toward a postcapitalist world, will work.

Meanwhile, it's not just America. Swastikas were on display at the Canadian national antivaxxers march, too. And, I've noted that the exposes Canadian exceptionlism as a fraud.

There's also a big hypocrisy factor in all of this. And that's that fascism actually is NOT going to give you bodily autonomy, of course.

===

Greenie types will also mix in identity politics with this, and a Rousselian noble savage version of that in saying "But Del Bigtree is American Indian, so he must be right." (High Country News, though not antivaxxer in general nor fascist, has nonetheless, by peddling a woke version of the noble savage idea, and naturalistic American Indian aid for COVID, helped put a respectable gloss on some of this.) And, per Wiki, he's not American Indian. Surely, unless you're so much a conspiracy theorist to believe that Pfizer vax-washes Wiki pages (and yes, I've heard that), if he WERE Indian, that would be on there.

Your Local Epidemiologist explains that no, the COVID-19 vaccine does not impact fertility.

The TSTA Blog is not impressed by Greg Abbott's "pandemic bill of rights".

Silver lining in so-called Canadian truckers' protest? Canadian exceptionalism exposed

The repugnance north of the US border, from trampling on Canada's War Memorial through hijacking the Terry Fox statue to repeated comments and acts of racism, all in the name of #FreeDumb? Yes, it does have a silver lining of sorts, or should, both for many Canadians and tea-sipping Democrats down here.

It undermines Canadian exceptionalism.

And, yes, there is such a thing.

It's like American exceptionalism, but like most things Canadian compared to American, it's more understated and less boisterous. In fact, that itself is part of Canadian exceptionalism — that it's all nice, polite Canadians compared to rowdy American yahoos.

That Canada is a lot less racist is the second shattering of Canadian exceptionalism. Anybody who knows Canada's history vis-a-vis First Nations has long known it's no better there than the US with American Indians. But, now the mask is off anti-Black racism north of the border, refuting the likes of Jordan Peterson. 

Sadly, a site that should know better, Richard Wolff's Independent Media Institute, perpetuates the "nice polite Canadians" and other Canadian exceptionalist bullshit, to the point of not even reporting that the majority of Give Send Go donations came from inside Canada, though the majority of donors were American. (This also means that the "deep pockets" were primarily Canuck, eh.) Meanwhile, the freeze on bank accounts is seemingly ramping up grifting that had already started. And, Tamara Lich has been arrested.

==

As for the so-called "Canadian truckers"? 

Well, another part of Canadian exceptionalism might be that Canadians are more truthful than Americans.

But, since only about 500 semis were reportedly driving to Ottawa on Friday, at least, there appear to be lies there, too. 

There's other lies being told on Twitter, by Canadians or others pretending to be Canadian. One is that Trudeau has equated truckers with racists. Nope:

Smartly, Trudeau then calls on non-racist protestors to call out the racists.

Dunno how well that will work; usually doesn't down here. 

The biggest lie is the unspoken lie that this is all out of the blue. Nope. Was discussed already in November, I believe. And, as Trudeau himself notes, the US already has a similar mandate in place, and that was known to be coming up for weeks now.

That gets back to the real why — shit-stirring by this Tamara Lich.

Third, per that same link, at least some of the backers, ie Tamara Lich and her ilk, illustrate that Canada isn't at all free of extremists, and not just racists, but also Islamophobes, and would-be separatists to the point of celebrating Jan. 6.

Is there a horseshoe theory to all this, too?

Supposedly, the brother of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh (admittedly, I don't know his brothers politics) is among donors to the "truckers." 

===

Finally, the bottom line? Canada's per-capita COVID death rate is about 30 percent that of the US. Per the stories, its vaccination rate is 80 percent or above. Trudeau and his advisors seem to be doing something right.

January 31, 2022

Abbott's "the lights stay on" promise to get its biggest test yet (updated)

#WinterStormAbbott as I have hashtagged it on Twitter, is headed to Tex-ass with the coldest weather since the killer Winter Storm Uri a year ago. 

Per Weather Underground, here's what things were predicted to be like in the Texoma area as of last night, when I was writing this:


First, and thank doorknobs, that's a reduction in the initial snow forecast; 24 hours earlier, nearly 8 inches was predicted.

Second, I am already anticipating the wingnuts showing how this means global warming and the larger climate change are both unreal.

It of course does no such thing.

If anything, since we're supposed to, overall, have warmer than average winter this year with the La Niña influence, the repeated irruptions of polar vortexes show just how true it is that climate change is real.

Third, per the header, is Abbott's promise. It's interesting he went on teevee to say that rather than talking to print media, or doing a presser for everybody. But Peter Lake of ERCOT then did a presser and it was Strangeabbott's idea.

Then, there's this surcharge on our electric bills, which R.F. O'Rourke has been hammering as the "Abbott tax."

So, how severe will the challenge be? With a chance of snow and two nights of overnight lows in the teens as far south as Waco? Two lows of a flat 20 with ice down in Austin? Abbott's probably got his fingers crossed. (South of Austin, and definitely on the Gulf coast, it looks like the weather will be inconveniencing, but not more than that.)

==

Update, 6 p.m. Monday: Strangeabbott is going to get lucky, it looks like. The storm's power is going to diminish, or coming in more from the west will weaken it or whatever. Temps in Austin stay above 20 with room to spare, and ice out of the forecast. Temps above 15 the full time in Waco, and "wintry mix" but not bad. Ditto for the Metromess.

Up here on the Red? Temperatures warmer ... no single digit problems. BUT? That ice predicted for Austin 24 hours ago? Now it's ours. The amount of precipitation continues to lessen, though.

Update, noon Tuesday: The Weather Service is still predicting single-digit lows Thursday. I'm not buying it. But, even it says winter storm "watch" not "warning" as of this time. That said, it's in more agreement with WU further south in Tex-ass.

==

Sidebar: Sadly, Twitter had plenty of seemingly Blue Anon-driven "gotcha."