Joe Posnanski lets Bill James pee on #sabermetrics like a crotchety old man

Joe Posnanski pretending
to do actual journalism.

I've never been a huge fan of Joe Posnanski, and I don't get sports buffs who are.

And, that's before he did his puff piece bio of Joe Paterno, which he refused to change to discuss anything about the Penn State sex abuse scandal centered on Larry Sandusky, and what Paterno might have known about it.

Frankly, I think Posnanski did that for two reasons.

One is that he had JoePa on that much of a pedestal and couldn't stand to see his idol destroyed.

The other?

$$$.

Pos wasn't about to shoot his own gravy train in the foot.

Well, as noted, he wasn't on a pedestal for me even before that. He was decent, above average ... generally good on baseball. I'm not a college football fan in any great degree, so don't care about him there. He's not good on golf, the few ventures he's made there.

Anyway, he tumbled after JoePa, and has never recovered, in my book.

And now, worse.

He's given Bill James a forum to take a whack, a cheap whack, at Wins Above Replacement.

No, WAR is not a perfect baseball metric. But, per this great rebuttal on Tom Tango, it's not a bad one, and it's no different from James' own Win Shares.

So, Pos let James set up a straw man or piñata and whack away at it for free. He never pointed out that it was a straw man.

Nor did he ask James, if he is that stats-o-phobic:
1. How the hell did James claim to have any credibility on WAR?
2. Why did he get into sabermetrics in the first place?

Instead, Pos runs some generic "bullshit" angle through the story, about James being a great bullshit detector. Well, either Pos isn't one himself (we know that with the JoePa bio, don't we), or he's got no problem being an active enabler of bullshit (we know that from the JoePa bio, don't we).

And, no wonder Pos is giving James free space to swing at straw men.

Per a link someone posted at Craig's NBC blog, James feels exactly the same way about Paterno as Pos does.

And, we all know what Pos can stand for.

Even worse, per my comment about Pos' bio, above, Pos didn't ask James the most basic question of all.

Is this about the $$$?

And, don't give me that bullshit, speaking of bullshit, about how James started doing this while working night security at a factory.

That was 30 years ago or more, when he wasn't thinking about $$$.

#Fail. By both of them.

And, we all know what Pos can stand for. Spell out the initials yourself.

Jose Canseco hits a new level of idiocy

Jose Canseco, idiot

Ex-roiding baseball player Jose Canseco just shot off one of his two middle fingers while allegedly cleaning his gun.

This leads to several jokes, a few of them on this original Hardball Talk blog piece.

There's mine, referring to his most ignoble night on a major league field:

Did the bullet bounce off his head and over the wall for a homer?

Yeah, I went there.

Or, this one, referring to his twin brother, Ozzie Canseco:

That is absolutely AWFUL news….for his brother Ozzie….

Who now has to remove a finger to keep masquerading as Jose at events that are, somehow, beneath Jose.

Zing!

On the other hand, he also blew his arm out trying to pitch. Maybe he can become a lefty, and with the missing digit, imitate Mordecai Brown, the famous Three-Finger Brown.

Several people have commented on the Darwin Award nature of this. The Twitter feed of his current GF, who used to be an ex-GF, and once (actual seriousness) had a restraining order against him shows that we're in the Darwin Awards mating division.

Finally, how do we know Jose wasn't drunk?



Or at least puking, if he's downing Old Swillwaukee.

Meanwhile, Alex Rodriguez and his "Romo Shuffle" with Tony Romo have been pushed off the front page of Roiders Inc. news. How does The Centaur respond?

Does roiding fry brain cells?

Meanwhile, maybe Jose wants to be in a new version of Lord of the Rings, as a roid-infested Frodo Baggins type.

You know, as Jose the Nine-Fingered and the Gun of Doom. Because he's going to rescue MLB from all the Mordorites who are the reasons why #BaseballIsDying.

Under the varieties of #denialism, some commonalities

Whether it's climate change denialism, or evolution denialism (Paul Braterman's alternative for creationism), or vaccine denialism (an alternative for antivaxxers), are there some commonalities among denialists?

Well, climate change denialists deliberately took over tactics, and even some spokespeople, from Big Tobacco. Beyond that, Massimo Pigliucci has much more to say, based on a one-day seminar on the issue he attended. Besides him, Brendan Nyhan was among participants, so it was a good one.

I've already dropped one comment there myself.

An excerpt:

Money and/or power drives much of this. Climate denialism is funded by Big Oil. Antivaxxers are driven (outside of emotional parents) largely by the money, and the power of fame, of certain members of Hollywood. Genocide denials are driven most by the power of governments, and their money. The power of tithing-type donations is behind creationists. 

They can buy the PR, the advertorial, the softball media interviews. We should be under no pretense that combating this will be easy. And, that’s not even counting the power of made-up minds engaged in group-reinforced motivated reasoning.

I suggest environmental friends, especially, drop over there and take a read.

Is Islam a relgion of peace? Yes, and also of war

Let me explain, in a roundabout way.

I've read plenty about the recent Ben Affleck and Reza Aslan vs Bill Maher dustup on Maher's show.

I've also read several of my online atheist friends see this as not only an easy opportunity to take a quick shot at Aslan, as here, but also to write off Affleck and at least partially support Maher.

First, this is Bill Maher the antivaxxer, etc. Atheists who claim to be skeptically-minded in general should continue to do so.

Second, Aslan, and Affleck, aren't all wrong. And, yes, I recognize above, that I'm arguing with a former Muslim cum atheist.

That said, my thoughts have gotten more guidance from Christopher Catherwood, a British scholar of religion, in his book, "Making War in teh Name of God."

He notes that many modern Muslims, primarily those living in the "West," outside the Dar al-Islam, do work to make Islam a religion of peace, and jihad an internal struggle against wrong ideas, motives, etc. Thus, for them, Islam IS a religion of peace. And, even if they're not a majority of Muslims in teh Dar al-Harb (traditional), or Dar al-Salaam (their alternative), they're at least a substantial minority.

Of course, in the Islamic heartland, it's different. At the same time, there are more liberal-minded Muslims inside the Dar al-Islam, even if a small minority. (I'm counting most rulers of states in the Muslim Middle East as being halfway secularized, and neither religiously conservative nor religiously liberal.)

For many of those Muslims, jihad is war against the infidel and Islam is, to the degree we focus in jihad, at least, a religion of war.

However, three other things pop in mind.

Two are my own.

Many liberal Christians say that Christianity is a religion of tolerance. They sincerely believe that, and, by and large, within their slice of Christianity, they're right. But, in the US at least, the majority of Christians is at least somewhat, if not fairly largely, intolerant.

How one falls on working to parse this issue is in part related to how much of a Gnu Atheist a particular atheist is. So, that too is cautionary for atheists ... at least those who don't want to be Gnu Atheists. If you do, well, I guess you can go ahead and stop reading.

Second is that, just as there is a larger, social and cultural, Islamism pushed by Islamists, there is a larger Christianism pushed by social Christianists such as Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis and Rodney Stark. And, while their may be a large gap between the US and Old Europe in terms of active, believing Christians, there's not nearly as much of a gap on the two sides of the pond on Christianism. Let's not forget that former French President Jacques Chirac said, several years ago, that Turkey should not be admitted to the European Union because it doesn't have a Christian heritage.

Third comes from Catherwood.

He notes that "church-state issues" have always had a different history in Islam than in Christianity. With his marriage to Khadija, Muhammad thrust himself into tribal-level politics at the start of Islam. The Umayyads headed one of Mecca's tribes. And, until the creation of Ataturk's Turkey, Islam had nearly 1,300 years of ... caesaropapism or whatever you call it.

Two other notes, also via Catherwood, with my spinoff on the second.

One is that both Islam and Christianity have, over the centuries, fought internecine religious wars, as well.

The other is that non-monotheistic religions (though his book covers just that), like fundamentalist Hindus, have also fought religions wars.

And, while I'm not far enough into his book to read about the third monotheism, Jews should remember that the ancestors of Herod the Great were converted at the point of a sword.

Texas #HSR — my latest thoughts

Japanese bullet train. / Photo via Texas Tribune

It looks like high-speed rail is a tad closer to reality in Texas, at least for the Dallas-Houston run.

That said, I'm not totally enamored of any of the nine proposed route options linked above.

I could see one or two straight runs, but I'd also like to see some "non-express" runs. And, to do that, we have to have a different route.

By car, if you take I-35 and Texas 6 rather than I-45, there's two small metropolitan areas between Dallas and Houston — Waco and Bryan/College Station. One or two non-express runs are still feasible, IMO.

Right now, part of Amtrak's problem (other than having no direct service between Dallas and Houston at all) is that it's trying to be an alternative to Greyhound as much as to airlines.

Check out all the places the Texas Eagle stops between Dallas and Austin, for example:
Fort Worth (perfectly fine)
Cleburne (why?)
McGregor (greater Waco, but why not in Waco?)
Temple (why, if you're stopping at McGregor)
Taylor (OK I guess)
Austin

If Amtrak did have a Dallas-Houston line, it would probably have eight or nine stops.

The point is to find a niche between the bus and air, in my opinion.

And, you can still do that with HSR in the way I outlined.

Of course, having just one run a day each between Dallas and Austin, in addition to none between Dallas and Houston, shows another problem. Even on regular trains, you mix an additional run or two a day with fewer cars on each one, which means quicker service.

Or, run an extra non-express route or two on weekends. Wacoans go to DFW, and College Station folks to Houston, for culture, special shopping, events, etc., on the weekends, via train.

That's how it's done in Europe. Here's the route of the French LGV Nord that goes from Paris to Calais (to hit the Channel Tunnel)

Gare du Nord (Paris)

Gare TGV Haute-Picardie1

Gare d'Arras²

Gare de Lille-Europe

Gare de Calais-Fréthun

Distances?

1st leg is 129 km; second is 55 km, third is 53 km; fourth is 122 km. The short legs are perhaps a bit on the short side, but you get the idea; a stop every 75 miles, even, is not unreasonable.

Ditto as another TGV line shows:

TGV Paris - Luxembourg stops at the following destinations:

    Paris

    Meuse TGV

    Metz

    Thionville

    Luxembourg City

Distances? 264 km on the first leg, 98 on the second, then local "milk run" distance on the last two. 

Give #GregAbbott one more movie texting

"Thank" Greg Abbott for interrupting your movie.

I blogged about Greg Abbott's "text me from the movies" idea when it first came out, but, since it's the last weekend before Election Day, he probably needs to hear it once more, as does the voting public.

I'm not a big moviegoer by any means. On average, a once-a-year guy at most, though I saw Lincoln twice.

That said, I can bitch along with anybody else about the growing blizzard of pre-movie commercials in the movie houses. And now, Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, aka AG Strangeabbott, has just given me more reason yet not to go.

Combine three barf factors:
1. Ads before movies;
2. Political advertising in general today;
3. People using cellphones at movies.

Anyway, here you go on Abbott's original pitch

In a new twist, Abbott is taking his campaign to the movies. He is running an ad in two dozen movie theaters across the state, playing on every screen a film is being shown. The ad asks moviegoers to text the word “FREEDOM” to the campaign. The effort is aimed at collecting information the campaign can use to identify and boost turnout in November.

This is also another post-Citizens United sign of a political system so damned swamped with money that candidates don't even know what the hell to do with all of it, other than inundate us even more.

That said, somebody, somebody, please text "FUCK OFF" to Abbott instead if you're at a movie.

I've called him AG Strangeabbott regularly, so either that or Dr. Strangelove is appropriate.

Or, if you want to send him more than text, send him Wendy Davis' "pull up the ladder" ad, which I blogged about and defended here:



Or, since the GOP is fond of the word so much anyway, maybe just text "no." Or, the overfried egg of War on Drugs PSAs, with "This is your brain on Abbott."