Willie Mays A's?

The initial premise of the baseball movie 'Major League' is that the fictional owner of the then Cleveland Indians, Rachel Phelps, wants to field a team so bad that attendance will fall below a magic threshold that will allow her to move the team to Miami.

Thus, the team brings in a broken down catcher from the Mexican league, a fireballer that (literally) can't see the plate, and a speedster named Willie Mays Hayes who can't hit.

Of course, in the end, everybody, including the owner and the long suffering fans, wins.

That does not look it will be the case for the real life fans of the current version of the Oakland Athletics 

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One-And-A-Half-Fans

PerUsherVille

The current version of the real life Oakland Athletics are still being run by Dr. Moneyball, Billy Beane.

Which means that while they routinely sell off high-priced stars to stock the shelves with cheaper  talent with quality 'metrics', the A's on-field product is almost always competitive.

What's going on in the A's front office, driven by team president Dave Kaval and owner John Fisher, however, is a completely different story:

...The attendance (for a recent home game with the Baltimore Orioles) was just 3,748, the lowest crowd count at the alternately dreary and cheery Coliseum since 1980. It's also the smallest crowd at a major league game minus pandemic restrictions since an announced 5,297 fans attended an August 2019 Miami Marlins game.

The reasons why are both well-worn and also infuriating...

{snip}

...Since the Raiders left and the pandemic landed, the A's have held all the cards and their actions suggest as much.

(The fan-friendly) A's Access (ticket program) was discontinued. Parking was jacked up to $30, even as COVID-19 restrictions left mass-transit options emaciated. Single-game tickets were raised – $25 for a third-deck seat in a decrepit football stadium, anyone? – and in the grimmest turn yet, many season-ticket packages were significantly raised before this season.

How much? A bleacher seat went from $456 in 2019 to $840 in 2022, according to the San Jose Mercury News, with more expensive options also doubling or nearly doubling.

Meanwhile, as the A's continued jumping through ever-growing hoops for their desired waterfront home at Howard Terminal, Kaval and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred teamed up on a not-so-subtle bit of dark messaging: Your current home sucks...

What are Mr. Kaval and his commissioner lackey Mr. Manfred up to here?

Well, if you pay any attention to professional sports whatsoever, it's essentially a most egregious version of a story you've likely heard before - essentially team owner Fisher is holding A's fans hostage while he attempts to force the city of Oakland into coughing up a half a billion dollars for a new ballpark that will make him and real estate developers billions.

And if that doesn't work, the Mess'rs Kaval and Fisher are threatening to move the baseball team, like the football team before it, to the Nevada desert.

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TheViewFromTheThird

DeckVille

When we lived in the Bay Area, back in the time of La Russa, it was a great time to be an Oakland A's fan.

We could walk to the North Berkeley Station, take the train down to the ballpark, and stroll right into the outfield bleachers. One afternoon I even went alone, with a then four month old Tiny E. in the backpack, so that we could wander around the concourse above the bleachers the entire game. I ate more than my share of hotdogs that day.

It was heaven out there in the bleachers. And it was cheap. And then Al Davis wrecked everything with his stupid mountain of seats and skyboxes that destroyed the up close and personal view of the field in front of you* and the panoramic view of the East Bay hills behind you.

Since then we've been back more than once - including the the spring day we went to see Vlady Senior after he abandoned Les Expos and went on to ply his trade for the pre-Troutian California Angels. At that time the former Tiny E. was getting bigger and the Oakland Coliseum was much fuller than it is now. 

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One time we were sitting near a bleacher denizen who bellowed... 'Hey, Rickey. They traded the wrong Henderson!'....The guy was referring to recently dispatched bleacher favourite Dave Henderson....Rickey just went into his crouch in left, put his right hand on his rear end out of view of all the other players on the field and gave the guy the finger...The fans all around us went bonkers...

Hey, just so you know...All is not lost with today's game because it turns out that sometimes there is crying in baseball...

And, on that note....Apparently there is a TV version of 'A League Of Their Own' coming...

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Something To Actually Be Outraged About...

 

What with all the faux outrage being generated by, say, the truckload, here is something genuinely disturbing that affects just about everyone in Canada:

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So.

How much are Canadians gouged for this in sum total?

This much:

...Telecommunications services (in Canada) are a $50-billion a year business — the third biggest household expenditure after shelter and food...


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Your Evening Audio...Cigarette Machine (Fred Eaglesmith Cover)

Fredheads

UniteVille


Bigger E. brought this tune to me just before Easter.

I'm having a hard time figuring out if there is any redemption whatsoever in there or not.

Selah...

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The pandemic seems to have taken some of the wind out of Mr. Eaglesmith's sails...Here he is a few years ago with his partner, Tif Ginn, telling a tale about the Texas State Troopers' Running Light Dogs before getting down to a road tune.



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The Pyramid Pardon Scheme, Defined.

TheLadderOfLaw(NoLonger)

HasNoTopAndNoBottom


The top of the scheme:

...In Donald J. Trump’s final hours as president in January 2021, he pardoned his onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who faced charges that he had conspired to swindle donors to a private group that promised to build a wall along the Mexican border.

But three men charged with Mr. Bannon were not pardoned...

And the bottom:

Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that BRIAN KOLFAGE and ANDREW BADOLATO pled guilty today in connection with their roles in defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to an online crowdfunding campaign known as “We Build the Wall.” Both defendants pled guilty before United States District Judge Analisa Torres...

Clearly, the noble here was properly handled.

At least in Trumpian pyramidalismic terms.


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Subheader/kicker earworm need scratching?...This.

Meanwhile, Driftglass points out the eighteen year education of Barack Obama when it comes to both siderism.


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The Times, The Trumpist, And The Tape.

Quislings'RThem

ContextVille


What's it all about this time Alfie?

Well we're talking what went down amongst the US'ian Republicans-In-The-Know as Congress got ready to vote on Mr. Trump's second impeachment for inciting insurrection in January of 2021.

Here's what the NY Times reported yesterday:

...When Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming asked about the chances Mr. Trump might resign, Mr. McCarthy said he was doubtful, but he had a plan.

The Democrats were driving hard at an impeachment resolution, (Republican House Leader) Mr. (Kevin) McCarthy said, and they would have the votes to pass it. Now he planned to call Mr. Trump and tell him it was time for him to go.

Mr. McCarthy said he would tell Mr. Trump of the impeachment resolution: “I think this will pass, and it would be my recommendation you should resign,” he said, according to the recording of the call, which runs just over an hour. The Times has reviewed the full recording of the conversation.

He acknowledged it was unlikely Mr. Trump would follow that suggestion...

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Here is yesterday's response from the longtime Trumpist, Mr. McCarthy:

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And finally, the bit you've likely heard about (often sans the context) on about a gazillion media outlets today...the tape:

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Image at the top of the post...A very different K. McCarthy, and my favourite Winnipeg Club/Monarch player of all time.

Tip 'O The Toque to....Digby.

In totally unrelated (not) news...Is anybody else wondering about a still to be built escalator from space and the ultimate political ambitions of a man named Musk?


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Local Postmedia Opinion Page...Mr. MacLeod's Job In Lotusland Is Done.

From Davide Mastracci in the National Observer, circa 2019, commenting on original reporting by Sean Craig who was then at Canadaland:

...(I)n October 2018, Postmedia’s then-president and now CEO, Andrew MacLeod, called a meeting and told National Post editors the publication was “insufficiently conservative.”...

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From yesterday's online version of the Vancouver Sun's OpEd page:

Gosh.

Does this mean that Mr. Ivison is now the house liberal?

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Boosters Work....Second Boosters Work Even Better.

Please note...

The controls/upper curves in the graphs here are NOT placebos.

They are either two or three jabs that have been compared to three or four, respectively.

This is really quite exceptional, especially given that this is the ultimate endpoint.

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The image is from a summary by Eric Topol...We've reported on the earlier studies previously...Here is the link to this week's paper (bottom graph) published in the New England Journal of Medicine.



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Lies And World Travel, vol 3.

TruthsWithNoTravelling

ShoesVille

When last we discussed the story of how the bogus US-funded Ukrainian Bioweapons Labs story went mainstream, we went through the immediate proximal origin story which was generated by a single conspiratorial Twitter account the day that Mr. Putin's forces began their war of aggression.

Essentially, the poster pushed the conspiracy story that the real reason for the war was because Mr. Putin wished to target such Labs in Ukraine.

Within a day the Twitter account concerned had been suspended and it's claims were thoroughly debunked.

So.

Why didn't the lie die then and there?

Well, pretty much immediately, Mr. Jones and the gang swung into action (no link on purpose):

****

Here, according to an investigatory report from the Anti-Defamation League, is a summary of what happened during the twenty-four hour period after the original tweet thread was posted on February 24th:

...Within hours of (the) initial tweet, InfoWars, a conspiracy site run by Alex Jones, published a story promoting the biolab conspiracy, crediting @WarClandestine for uncovering what it dubbed the “ulterior motive theory.” QAnon forums and Telegram channels also began to share the theory. Meanwhile, the hashtag #USBiolabs began trending on Twitter and TikTok, where posts promoting the conspiracy racked up tens of thousands of likes...

Snopes has more on this period, including a description of how various hashtag conspiracists managed to tie themselves into further knots because of, you guessed it, COVID-19:

...Conspiracy theories are very often built on top of one another. The claim that the U.S. is operating biolabs in Ukraine, for example, is built on the false notion that the United States (or, according to similar theories, China) intentionally started the COVID-19 pandemic with a human-made bioweapon. Once you buy into that rumor, you can be sold the next: that Russia is invading Ukraine to stop the next pandemic...

On social media, a number of people responded to a #usbiolabs thread with false claims about Russia attacking Ukraine to stop a “Covid-2” bioweapon from being released...

And then, with the brush fire already lit, the state actor-driven flame-fanning soon began:

...On February 26, the state-owned Russian news outlet Sputnik posted on Telegram what it claimed were "some of the documents on US biolabs in Ukraine." The post included what appeared to be a basic fact sheet about a regional laboratory of veterinary medicine based in Luhansk...

This was followed by more furious flame fanning the very next day:

...On February 27th – just three days after his thread was posted – the Russian Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina posted on Facebook endorsing the theory, accusing the United States of stuffing “Ukraine with biolaboratories, which – quite possibly – were used to study methods for the destruction of the Russian people at the genetic level.”...

Which led the original Twitter poster, who by then had a new account, to crow:

...“My hypothesis was correct!... Russian air strikes in Ukraine have nothing to do with Ukraine, but rather AMERICAN ASSETS in Ukraine! It means this “war” is MUCH bigger than Ukraine. It’s a skirmish with the United States of America.”...

And how did this now fully blazing 'hypothesis' reach the floor of the US Senate less than two weeks later?

Stay tuned for Volume 4....

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Meanwhile....If the state-prop shoe fits...fake film frame it.

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And The Tulips Were Boiled In Their Tanks.

HedgeAgainstInflation
SchmemflationVille


From Matt Novak in Gizmodo:

Crypto investor Sina Estavi bought an NFT of Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet ever for $2.9 million in March of 2021. And after a year of constant hype for NFTs, most people would naturally assume Estavi might be able to turn a nice profit on his investment by now. But most people would be wrong.

Estavi put the NFT up for auction last week, and bidding ended on Wednesday. The highest bid? Roughly $277 worth of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, at current prices, according to crypto news outlet CoinDesk...

Gosh.

One can only wonder if the good Mr. Poilievre is looking for just such a chained to the blockhead-type bargain?


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Header and image at top of post...William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac once wrote a book about tanks and boiling that involved hippos not tulips.


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Vancouver Civic Politics (ctd)...Oh Captain My Captains, Plural?

AllHandsOnAll

DecksVille

Yesterday we finally learned, for real, that the new alphabet political ship in town captained* by Ken Sim would have three new mates on board.

From FABula's piece in the Globe:

A new Vancouver civic party and its mayoral candidate, Ken Sim, got a significant boost Monday when three current city councillors said they’d be running with him in this fall’s election.

It’s a significant coup for the ABC Vancouver party to gain incumbents Sarah Kirby-Yung, Lisa Dominato and Rebecca Bligh. All were elected under the Non-Partisan Association banner in 2018 and later left because they said the party had become right-wing and undemocratic...

However...

Soon thereafter one of the mates apparently signalled that she is open to communicating with a potential new skipper.

Or some such thing.

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*And built and backed, according to Ms. Bula, by a political shipping magnate named Peter Armstrong.



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Vancouver Civic Politics...The End Of The NPA?

Link

FinalNailsAnd

CoffinsVille

Former NPA mayoral candidate Ken Sim, who left the party in a huff, apparently, at least in part, due its hard right turn awhile back, has constituted his own party with other disaffected civic pol types, types who are actually elected councillors at the moment.

So.

Who benefits from a for real split on the right side of the CoV ledger?

Conventional wisdom will likely weigh in saying that this all but ensures Mr. Stewart and friends will have a relatively easy ride this fall.

After all, this development is essentially like having a guy named John Coupar Mellencamp getting himself on the ballot and hiring a thousand buses, or some such James not Jim-type thing.

But...

One can only wonder if Marky-Mark will soon start spouting off about how he is the only one who can be the uniter in this town.

And why not?

After all, M-M's Wiki page is as clean as a whistle these days.

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Update, Monday evening: Hmmmm...Looks like Marky-Mark's charmingly offensive charm-offensive has already begun...

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Has Mr. Putin's Expansionist Plan Gone Sideways?

EightHundredAnd

ThirtyVille

And, no, we're not talking about the outer reaches of the Donbas.

Instead, we're talking about Scandinavia.

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Here was the situation one month before Mr. Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine:

...There is no mistaking the long-standing animosity between Russia and NATO, with whom Putin’s government broke ties in 2021, calling back its NATO mission in Brussels. For months, Russian officials have been demanding that NATO stop expanding, bar Ukraine and Georgia from joining, and kick out members that have joined since 1997...

Here, apparently, is the situation, now:

Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a "massive strategic blunder" that could result in an expansion of Nato as early as this summer, officials have claimed.

According to the Times (of London), US officials reportedly confirmed that membership of the alliance for Sweden and Finland was "a topic of conversation" during talks between Western foreign ministers last week attended by representatives of both Nordic countries.

It is thought the two nations could launch a bid for Nato membership in the coming months in the wake of Russia's widely condemned military assault.

Finland -which shares an 830-mile land border with Russia - is expected to apply for Nato membership by June, with Sweden potentially poised to follow soon after...

If this happens, Mr. Putin will have achieved a feat that not even Mess'r's Stalin, Malenkov, Khruschev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chermenko, combined, could achieve.

Imagine that.

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The next installment of the generation and the propagation of the big lie of US'ian bioweapons labs in Ukraine is coming...Just busy with the end of term stuff and all...The first two installments are here and here...

Image at the top of the post...Finnish and Russian border marks...from RCINet.

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Let The Franco Nose Holding Begin!

StrategicVoting

UberAllesVille

First there was this:

And soon thereafter there was this:

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Lies And World Travel, vol 2

TruthsWithNoTravelling

ShoesVille 

In volume one of this story we noted that, by mid-March of this year the mainstream media was having a little difficulty figuring out why, exactly, it was continuing to cover the Ukranian Bioweapons Lab story when they knew it was not true.

So.

How, exactly, did the story even start?

Well...

The Anti-Defamation League has determined the identity, and the QAnon connections, of a former restaurant manager and Army National Guard veteran who, using the handle @WarClandestine began tweeting things like the following on February 24th, the day that Russia began its war of aggression against Ukraine:

This person went so far as to posit that destroying US-funded biological weapons labs was Mr. Putin's real motivation for bombarding places like, say, Kiev:

The Twitter account concerned was soon suspended and by the next day, February 25th, groups like Politifact had investigated and thoroughly debunked the claims:

...There are no U.S.-run biolabs in Ukraine. The country is one of many former Soviet Union republics, and other countries, partnering with the Defense Department as part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program...

And what, exactly, is the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program?

...The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program began after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 to reduce the threat of existing weapons of mass destruction. It is also known as the Nunn-Lugar Program (named after the senators who passed the Soviet Threat Reduction Act) and is housed within the Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation...

And how, precisely, has the program been used in Ukraine?

...(T)he U.S. Department of Defense Cooperative Threat Reduction Program has provided technical support to the Ukrainian Ministry of Health since 2005 to improve public health laboratories, whose mission is analogous to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

Given all that, you may be wondering how the lie managed to out-race the truth around the world in the interim.

That's something we'll get to in the next installment of the story...

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Lies And World Travel, vol 1

I'm pretty sure you've come across the following phrase:

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

And I'm almost as sure that you've heard the phrase attributed to Mark Twain.

Or, even, Winston Churchill.

But neither is true, as the phrase was first uttered in various versions long before it was attributed to either Twain or Churchill:

“A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.” C. H. Spurgeon, Gems from Spurgeon (1859). An earlier version appears in the Portland (Me.) Gazette, Sept. 5, 1820: “Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling her boots on.” Still earlier, Jonathan Swift wrote in The Examiner, Nov. 9, 1710: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”

But, regardless its true form and/or it's or its actual originator, there is no question that there is validity in the phrase, perhaps now more than ever.

To wit, the lie that is the Ukranian Biolabs story...

The following was the state of play on March 14th, three weeks into Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine:

Russia’s early struggles to push disinformation and propaganda about Ukraine have picked up momentum in recent days, thanks to a variety of debunked conspiracy theories about biological research labs in Ukraine. Much of the false information is flourishing in Russian social media, far-right online spaces and U.S. conservative media, including Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News...

But how did the lie start and how did it travel around the world almost immediately on February 24th, the day war started?

Stay tuned for volume 2...

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