Humbug!

Happy Xmas, denizens of the Internet. Or, you know, a tolerable one, anyway.

I had started to write a post about how Christmas is a drag for a lot of us fifth-wheel types in this society, and it's true that for me and plenty of others Christmas is less a time to anticipate and celebrate than a time to endure and get through. It's the loneliest time of year, sometimes especially when surrounded by other people unwittingly flaunting their relative happiness.

But that post was starting to get not just dour and depressing but hostile and resentful, and that's not where I want to be. So I'll just say to everyone out there, enjoy whatever you're doing tomorrow and whomever you spend it with. Myself, I will spend tomorrow cooking Mexican food and watching movies and punting my real holiday to Wednesday, when the people I want to be with are free of their relatives. That's just how it is, and I'm good with that as the alternatives are worse or to ignore the holiday altogether.

Meanwhile, some notes of positivity to lighten things up some...

• The new Captain America comics are outstanding. By J. Michael Straczynski and Jesús Saiz, the new series follows Cap mostly in his plain-clothes Steve Rogers state as he opts to buy his former apartment building from the slumlord that was going to demolish it and instead renovate it and keep its residents from being tossed out. A very Steve Rogers thing to do. While doing this we see Steve flash back to his childhood memories related to the building, which of course were in the 1930s as World War II was ramping up. Those events will tie into a current threat, of course, but it's a nice little parallel to see presentations of scrawny pre-super-soldier-serum Steve and his neighbors clash with the very real American Nazis of the 1930s and witness them describe their nefarious plans for Germany and the US in language that is reflected menacingly by modern-day Republicans in the real non-comic-book world. Straczynski's idea was to explore a Captain America backstory that hasn't been tapped yet:

  The years young Steve was on his own were the same years during which the American Bund – for all intents and purposes the Nazi Party in America – was growing very powerful in real world New York, blocks from where he lived. They held public marches and rallies, harassed people, and spread hate, all part of an effort to get America on the side of the Nazis, a campaign that came to a head with the biggest Nazi rally on American soil in history, as tens of thousands of people, Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, crammed into Madison Square Garden to celebrate their dream of a thousand-year Reich. We are going to put young Steve right into the middle of that real-life vortex, where despite terrible odds he will make a crucial difference at an even more crucial moment. For a young Peter Parker, the murder of his uncle Ben was a transformational event putting him on the path to becoming Spider-Man. This story will be equally transformational, putting a young Steve Rogers on the path to being the hero he eventually becomes.

  Anyway, it's great, I recommend it.
• Speaking of fascist movements in America, Miles Taylor's new book Blowback is essential reading for anyone who hasn't been paying attention to American politics for the last, oh, ten years or so. Taylor was "Anonymous," the author of the unsigned New York Times Op-Ed that explained that he was among the grown-ups reining in the worst abuses of the Trump Administration; this book not only delves into what that meant, but how as Trump learned how the government worked—which is to say, as he figured out where the laws and officials that prevented him from doing the various un-American and illegal things he wanted to do were situated—he began to worm his way around obstacles via legal loopholes and things like "acting" appointments of toadies that needn't be approved by anyone. Which meant that the adults in the room were no longer effective at reining him in and were largely forced to depart. Each chapter starts with details on Taylor's experiences and ends with the logical extension of how the next authoritarian to reach office will behave. It's an excellent book and a chilling read, so not exactly uplifting and fun, but tremendously worthwhile nonetheless.
• For all Mankind is back with its fourth season on AppleTV+, and it's great as always. The only characters still around from the beginning are Ed Baldwin, Dani Poole, and Margo Madison, but the whole group is terrific. The show starts off in July of 1969, whereupon history diverges from what we know when the Soviets land on the moon first. Over the course of the series, the divergent history gets farther and farther away from what we know from the "real world," and in the current season we're in the early 2000s establishing a more permanent presence on Mars, or at least trying to. I miss executive producer Ronald D. Moore's more hands-on influence and past characters, especially Jodi Balfour's Ellen Waverly/Wilson, but I still eagerly await each new episode.

2024 is just around the corner. Buckle up, folks, it's going to be a wild one.

Tagged The Black Hole, Holidays   |   Posted on December 24, 2023 at 7:40pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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So long to a Mariner who deserved better

The Rodney Dangerfield of pitchers

The baseball winter meetings are in full swing, and Your Seattle Mariners were among the teams to make some news with a big trade.

The other day, the Mariners dealt outfielder Jarred Kelenic, first baseman Evan White, and pitcher Marco Gonzales to Atlanta for two formerly highly-touted pitching prospects that now have questionable abilities. On its face, it makes no sense and I can't yet figure what part this plays in the alleged master plan for the 2024 season.

I'm unhappy with this trade mostly because I am a huge Marco Gonzales fan. I might be Marco's biggest fan that isn't related to him. I say that because Marco has been, as I've long described him, the Rodney Dangerfield of Major League pitchers—he gets no respect.

Local fans soured on him over the last couple of years, and frankly they weren't that high on him to begin with, which doesn't really speak well of local fandom. The team itself seemed to think poorly of him—the club's former CEO referred to him as a "boring" pitcher; his manager seemed not to trust his ability to navigate baserunners; he was even left off the postseason roster in 2022, which was a huge metaphorical slap in the face.

That all annoyed me, to put it mildly. Marco is the sort of pitcher I love to watch; rather than rely on sheer muscle or wacky breaking stuff, he succeeds by spotting the ball and mixing pitches and being smart. When healthy—and he hasn't been for much of the last two seasons—he's just sneaky good, good enough to be a 20-game winner if only he had an offense behind him that could score more than a couple of runs for him and/or a manager that didn't panic when two runners get on with two out in the middle innings. He should have won 20 in 2019 but had to settle for a 16-13 campaign that included six losses in which he posted a quality start (6+ innings and no more than 3 earned runs allowed), including a 1-0 game and two 2-1 contests.

After dominating in the 2020 mini-season (3rd in the league in WHIP, 8th in ERA, 1st in K:BB ratio), he had to deal with forearm problems in ’22 and ’23, plus personal traumas that by his own admission took his focus off the game. Still put up decent numbers, though. And, through it all, Marco Gonzales remains a top-notch human, dedicated family man and proud local resident and generally good-natured guy.

But he's not flashy and his recent injury troubles contributed to a lot of negativity from the aforementioned local fandom. The guy deserves better.

Hopefully he'll get better respect with his new team, whomever that turns out to be.

For now, that's the Atlanta Braves, but the rumor is that the Braves intend to flip him elsewhere. Seeing that caused me to revise my initial impression of the trade—at first it appeared that the M's representative, be it operations chief Jerry Dipoto or new "general manager" Justin Hollander, started things off by shopping Kelenic and his massive whiff rate and after back-and-forth got snookered into a bad deal.

Now it appears that getting rid of Marco was the real goal in order to dump some salary. He's on the last year of his contract and is owed a sizeable-but-not-upper-echelon chunk of change in ’24. Atlanta wanted Kelenic, Seattle said, "OK, but you also have to take Gonzales," and Atlanta countered with, "well, that doesn't help us, throw in something else maybe," and Seattle said, "well, we have this first baseman we thought was going to be a star before we rushed him to the bigs too fast and then had to have a bunch of surgeries." Which Atlanta replied with, "OK, but you already gave him a big contract, so you'll have to cover most of that," and Seattle said, "fine, what do we get in return," and Atlanta said, "you can have this former 2nd-round draft pick that just had Tommy John surgery and hasn't thrown a professional pitch yet and another former top draftee reliever that's stunk it up since turning pro and that we just took a flyer on." Seattle replied, "So, two big unknowns that won't likely do anything for us right away if ever? Sounds good! Let's sign it."

At least, that's how I picture it.

Fitting, really. Even after being traded Marco is dissed by his new team, they don't even want him. The injustice of it all.

Meanwhile, I'm fine giving away Kelenic. He was a bust, and though he could turn it around and live up to his top prospect status at some point, he probably wasn't going to do that here. White I'm sorry to see go, but he's kind of like the pitcher the M's got in return, a former top prospect coming off of surgery and a big question mark for the future. He's an elite defensive player, but given how the M's botched his development years who knows if he'll ever hit.

With the Mariners having previously traded third baseman Eugenio Suárez to the Diamondbacks (also for not much return in a salary dump) and letting right fielder Teoscar Hernández go via free agency, they've rid themselves of three of the worst strikeout offenders in the Majors as well as about $50M in payroll obligations. It remains to be seen what they spend that savings on or who will fill the resulting holes.

Good luck, Marco. I hope wherever you end up you have a decent manager and get your 20-win season.

UPDATE

As I was writing this, Atlanta flipped Marco to the Pittsburgh Pirates. For basically nothing. More disrespect. Atlanta offloaded him in exchange for merely the ever-popular Player to be Named Later or Cash Considerations from the Pirates, and Atlanta will end up paying most of his salary.

Tagged Baseball, Seattle Mariners   |   Posted on December 5, 2023 at 7:42pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Mass insanity

I am one of those people that follows politics and the national news fairly closely and that's not been terribly good for my mental health the last several years. The American Nervous Breakdown, as Bob Cesca calls the phenomenon that has led to our current social reality, has many facets. It's not just the propaganda that feeds the bonkers cultists who go to Trump rallies and buy AR-15s, the bonkers voters who elect the worst people Congress has ever seen, the bonkers corruption happening out in the open on the Supreme Court, and the bonkers racists that feel like they now have permission to be openly hateful in all their daily interactions. It's also those of us seeing all this going on and justifiably freaking the fuck out about it.

We have to keep tabs on it, too. It does no one any good, not even ourselves, to ignore it and act like that dog in the fire meme saying "this is fine." Yet, a huge percentage of us here in ’Murca are doing just that, either not paying attention at all or somehow are of the mind that the literal fascist uprising that is the modern Republican party is hunky-dory with them, and the consequences for this ignorance could be catastrophic. Thus, the anxiety meter goes to 11.

Joe Biden has an approval rating of just 41%. That's crazy. When you consider the obstructionist Congress and the sheer scale of damage to governmental function he inherited, his accomplishments are amazing. 

The recent polling—yeah, I know, polls; not exactly the most reliable information of late, the methodology is still in need of some tweaking—is astonishing. A huge majority of Americans think the economy is merely "fair" or "poor"?! Inflation is way down. Unemployment is remarkably low. People are spending. Yes, some things are more expensive than they were a couple years ago, but some of that is normal and the things that are a real concern for folks—housing costs, insurance, medical care—have to be looked at in context.

There is a lag time to policy change. Much as we might like the effects of legislation or judicial appointments to be immediate, they're not. Just as the inflation we've been dealing with of late can be traced to consequences of the COVID pandemic and its horrendous mishandling by the previous administration (as well as the consequences of some positive things, like rising wages), the stabilizing effects of the Inflation Reduction Act and tax reforms take time to spread through society. Just as the horrors being visited on us by the Supreme Court and other jurisdictions since Joe Biden took office are the result of the previous guy's appointments and the Republican Senate's leader preventing President Obama from filling a staggering number of judgeships—a years-long buildup—reclaiming the judiciary for the rule of law and the Constitution is not a short-term project.

We've got a critical vote coming up in 11 months. People better start paying attention.

Upset that your health insurance costs more? I am. I had to change to a worse policy for next year and I'll still be paying about 25% more in premiums. Is that Joe Biden's fault? Hell no! In fact, he's managing to keep it from being worse! The alternative—those fascist Republicans—want to kick people off of health coverage altogether. They want insurance companies to rob the rest of us blind. Give Joe Biden a Democratic supermajority in Congress and we'll get an expanded Affordable Care Act and better coverage for less.

Pissed that your groceries cost more? Well, in point of fact, not all of them do, some things are less expensive now, but the alternative to President Biden and Democratic attention paid to the affordability and quality of those groceries is those fascist Republicans, who want to abolish regulations that seek to ensure the meat and produce you buy won't put you in the hospital, a hospital that you won't be able to afford because they will have also taken away your health insurance.

Squeezed by your rent every month? Well, that's really a function of locality and a lot of interrelated factors, so I'm not sure what will help there. But I can tell you that the Republican policy that favors corporations over human beings will allow more and more disparity and exacerbate the wealth disparities that make cities like mine so damned expensive to live in.

And then there's the "Biden's too old" thing. When people say they're concerned about Joe Biden's age, there needs to be a follow-up question: What factors related to his age worry you and have you seen any evidence that he's at all incapable? Do people think he's forgetful or can't stay focused? All evidence says he's not and he can. Do people think if he does become incapable that he'll deny that reality and his staff and cabinet will allow it? Do they even know who's in the cabinet? Do people think if he dies in office or had to resign for his health there'd be no capable and effective replacement—i.e., do they fear Kamala Harris? Why? How much of the "he's too old" thing is camouflaged racism/misogyny regarding the VP? And, once again, even if people insist their age-related concerns are legitimate, consider the alternative: a doddering, fascistic criminal in far worse health and cognitively challenged even at his peak, who is bent on petty revenge and completely lawless, greedy, and sociopathic.

I swear, every election cycle it appears that more Americans get dumber. Here's a poll I'd like to see conducted: Let's survey Americans about their knowledge of how their government works. Show them some "Schoolhouse Rock" and ask if they knew about the details presented therein before.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, President Biden   |   Posted on December 2, 2023 at 11:47pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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