Vox fact checks DJT on Amazon and the Post Office

The tone of the article tries to imply he’s wrong… because they’re Vox and he’s a Trump, ya know. But all their center left neo lib commerce think tank guys quoted support DJT’s assertion.

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/30/17176852/trump-amazon-post-office

I want to pirouette to another mail topic. Ya’ll signed up Informed Delivery Daily Digest? This is new from the Post Office in the last year. You get an email each morning saying what your mail is. And its a smash, people love it.

Doesn’t seem there’s a meaningful journalism treatment out there of this thing, no one has reported on it.

Guy down at the bar worked on the as a post office computer guy, he works at the big Eagan location.

How about a software engineer

http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2018/03/30/could-an-accountant-play-a-credible-inning-of-major-league-baseball/

If I was say 35 and had the swing I have now, I think I could generate a ground ball off a pitcher the quality of say Nick Blackburn. Nick was the epitome of the major league 89 mph right handed starting pitcher.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/blackni01.shtml

Anyway, there’s quite a few excellent players, dozens upon dozens, in Minnesota amateur ball who really would have no great difficulty dialing their swing up to a 90 mph fastball. Quite a few pitchers in there that throw 88-90 as well.

So yeah, you could find a guy who would’t get exposed immediately as physically outmatched by the pro competition.

I await the inevitable Coates / Williamson buddy movie

Liberal shrieking to deplatform Kevin Williamson at the Atlantic could have been anticipated. It’s fizzling out though:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/03/maybe-its-time-to-wind-down-the-kevin-williamson-affair/

Ta-Nehisi Coates thinks Kevin Williamson is pretty great.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/28/noted-absence-effort-get-kevin-williamson-fired/

Which was my sense all these years. I did a search, I mentioned Kevin Williamson 20 or so times in a thousand posts.

I like them both. Neither of them are ivy league writers, BTW. Williamson is a University of Texas grad and I think literally started his career as an $8.50/hr copy guy at the equivalent of a suburban shopper newspaper. Coates doesn’t have a degree far as I know, started at urban alt weeklies.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/28/17166094/the-americans-season-6-premiere-dead-hand-recap-philip-elizabeth

http://theweek.com/articles/763747/americans-still-best-show-television

Roseann

Nevermind: the rubes have spoken, circle me Bert stays

http://www.startribune.com/twins-fans-draw-line-in-the-sand-over-end-of-circle-me-bert/478186863/

local baseball snob expresses unpopular opinion: I dont like Bert doing color on TV and I don’t like circle me Bert

Good riddance.

http://www.startribune.com/bert-blyleven-there-will-be-no-more-circle-me-bert/478111643/

I don’t think Bert is a very good color man, generally. He’s got a lot of knowledge as a function of who he is, but he’s also a little thick between the ears. He doesn’t stammer doing TV and never did, but its still not obvious to me that as a matter of skill he deserves the job he’s doing. As far as ex-players go, Gladden does this job better (on radio).

Bert was formative in my life. He was traded back to the Twins in 85 and as a youth I spent a lot of time mimicking the 1-7 spin he put on his curveball. Penultimate personal culmination of that was, in a 1994 or 95 amateur playoff game against S. St Paul (before they became Stockemen’s Irish), I came in as a reliever and struck out the side with the bases loaded. Every pitch catcher called was a curveball, he wouldn’t let me throw my 71 mph fastball. Thanks Bert!

Prognostications: the sabermetric predictions of accepted rigor (PECOTA, etc) say the Twins will win 86 or so games. I think that’s low. They have the look of a 90-93 win team at least. If that’s true, that’s an easy playoff berth.

Cousin watch: Coastal on Seder fish

— Read on www.kare11.com/mobile/article/entertainment/television/programs/kare-11-sunrise/gefilte-fish-and-its-role-in-the-passover-seder/89-532442250

jots w/ dots 3/27

First 2, wanted to circle back and discuss a couple news things that happened month of Feb…

In Syria you had a mercenary group composed

greatly of Russian ex-soldiers, and they wanted to approach an industrial oil installation in the frontier there and perhaps occupy it for purposes of mayhem, as Russians will do. But it was already occupied by the legitimate US military. What happened next…. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/world/europe/russia-syria-dead.html Strikes me that this is the preferred outcome, and a good one, and that we would not have been assured of the same outcome under the Obama administration. Myab e not though. Anyway, I am not gungho pro-military, temperamentally I’m more like Rand Paul… but that was good.

No link, but am intrigued by the notion Jared Kushner is putting together peace in the middle east. Is this happening, or is it BS?

I didn’t vote for Trump and won’t in 2020, but if I did this would be why https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/us/politics/trump-judges-courts-administrative-state.html?

Our perfect, earnest McCabe-ian public servants in the deep state are going to F up the Mateen / Pulse nightclub trial. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/26/597000451/pulse-gunmans-father-was-fbi-informant-his-widow-s-lawyers-say What hasn’t been said, and could be said also, is this: Omar was a glaring red flag way before the shooting, and was able go ahead because the FBI’s had a lack of interest that was enabled by familiarity with his father. The whole thing is an episode of ‘enabling’ and the FBI were the enablers.

The boom the new bridge created was not in western WI, but downtown Stillwater http://kstp.com/traffic/downtown-stillwater-sees-30-million-in-development-projects-after-st-croix-crossing-helps-with-traffic-congestion/4840006/?cat=1 There’s been a few closings of eateries lately actually (Smalley’s, Pub 112), but I could guess it might be lease turnover where people didn’t want to renew at higher, boom time rates.

New Lambo column overt at WWP: he fantasizes the Trump Admin meltdown / indictments are coming over the summer, and a Cambridge Analytica / Russia nexus will be key. I doubt it. The Zingy wisdom on Trump Russia, btw: No collusion in the election. I would guess, yes, the Trump businesses were a vehicle for Russian money laundering at various points in the last 20 years. I doubt that makes for an indictment, and I can’t think of anything else that will. Trumps greatest business frauds… the real estate schools, taking his company public to shed pesonal balance sheet debts… those are all in plain sight. If no one can indict for that (… and no one ever did), then you cant indict for anything. Trump will be President at least until January 2021.

The impending record Damond settlement

The reporter expresses it in terms of maybe and if.

http://www.startribune.com/record-payout-could-come-from-minneapolis-if-civil-lawsuit-is-filed-in-justin-ruszczyk-damond-death/477985583/

There is no maybe and if, it will be a record for Minnesota and and an eyebrow raiser around the country.

The floor is $6M, which has been an amount for something of a quick claim settlement in some of these police cases the last few years.

I think the ceiling is probably $20M, as one of the quotes alludes. Just depends on the will of the family and Bennett to embark on the march of time to the inevitably winnable trial.

Settlement will probably be announced right after the verdict in the criminal trial though, and it does not matter there if Noor is not convicted.

I said that: Yes, FarmVille was the inflection point for our modern FB absurdity

https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/farmville-helped-sow-the-seeds-of-the-cambridge-analytica-scandal.html?

This is my fight song: I’m going to lead my 35+ league in home runs this year….

Sayeth I with the determination of Barry Bonds as he topped up a syringe full of Winstrol.

3 home runs in 13 games will do the trick in this wood bat league.

I hit several balls more than 300 ft down left last year, and they didn’t go out because the fence was at 325 where I was.

This was before I had self awareness that this old fat guy was getting his hands around on inside fastballs quite easily. Now I know….

Schedule is out – we play at Van Cleve in Dinkytown 7 times. Van Cleve has a 15 foot fence in left, 280 feet away. I can get over it.

We play at 3 other hybrid youth / adult fields where I can probably hit it out with my ‘pull’ swing.

I’ll get 50 at bats on the season, need to hit 3 home runs. I’m going for it.