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The Inertia Boys, two-time defending champeeeens…

Looks like this year’s going to be a bit harder than last. The funny thing about auctions is that, much like a compressor, they tend to squish teams into the same general ranges. You can tell as my dominance is slightly diminished, but more in that almost everyone else is more compressed than they were in the draft.

Drafts end up with much more variable outcomes with huge outliers on either end. In an auction, those outliers are limited to people who either have no idea how to evaluate (Random Harvest, here), or those who are just blind to 1/2 of the game (Moonlight Graham, Purple Cobras). My team is, again, remarkably (and surprisingly) balanced. I think the meme of “focus on offense!” has become so strong that there are a lot more values on the pitching side than there were last year. Both of the offense-heavy guys are ones that have been trying to copy me for two years now. I think we’ve got the form but not the underlying philosophy going on here.

I’d post up the 11×12 head to head league one too (don’t ask, the categories are retarded. Enough to make Crawford the clear #2 hitter in the league). I win on overall season value, but it’s even closer than here, and after the #1 and #2, it quickly devolves… but it’s head to head so what’s the point? So much of head to head relies upon luck and small sample size. It’s ridiculous and I hate it. It’s the fantasy format for football fans and weekend warriors. The variability is kind of fun, but when you’re playing for money that’s way too much to leave up to chance.

I’ll put the Inertia Boys roster after the jump.
Read more…

Here’s a snapshot of my post-mortem analysis of my 12 team, 5×5, roto, redraft league results:

That’s points in hitting on the X axis (higher is better, max = 60), and points pitching on Y (higher is better, max = 60). A perfectly balanced team would be on the line of y = x (visually, 45 degrees up and to the right). The further you are from the line, the more imbalanced you are. The closer you are to origin, the worse your team. That big blog out there on the top right? The balanced one with no one even near it? That’s me. Even with high variability put in (+- 3 points in both axis), I’ve got lots of room to spare.

Domination, thine name is Chris.

Too bad I can never leave well enough alone and will tinker with this team, probably right into the ground.

Today’s the last fiscal day of the fundraising quarter. If you can, now would be the best time possible to show your love for the Nedrenaline/desire to stop the Joementum.

For better or worse, the candidates that can raise more earlier get far more later as the people with money tend to wait and back the “winning” horses… and you get more money by showing that you can get more money. In any event, giving something, even just a little, in a primary has far more effect than in the general election. Your $10 is probably equal to 100 in the general. I gave a bit to Lamont and if you can, I encourage you to do so as well.

Lieberman must go. That Lamont seems like my kind of Democrat just makes it all the better.

Update: Lamont made it to 3,422 donors, well past the 3,000 goal. Good job!

Prince’s Chart Coronation

Prince is purple reigning on the charts.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, who launched his career nearly three decades ago, scored his first ever number-one debut, as 3121 rolled up sales of 183,000 copies for the week ended Sunday, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Behold, the power and the glory of FSM, for his legions of pastafarian followers shall scoop up your album by the truckload. It helps if you’re a fabulous pop song writer and an incredibly talented musician as well, but FSM’s benevolence is apparent – and necessary! – here.

Later on in the article, we are also presented with incontrovertible proof that we are in the decline phase of the empire

thanks to an American Idol guest appearance, Barry Manilow’s The Greatest Songs of the Fifties rocketed 22 spots to number four on 78,000 copies.

Hunter-killer drones and remote CIA assassinations coming to a town near you

Unmanned aerial vehicles have soared the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq for years, spotting enemy encampments, protecting military bases, and even launching missile attacks against suspected terrorists.

Now UAVs may be landing in the United States.

A House of Representatives panel on Wednesday heard testimony from police agencies that envision using UAVs for everything from border security to domestic surveillance high above American cities. Private companies also hope to use UAVs for tasks such as aerial photography and pipeline monitoring.
Click for photos

“We need additional technology to supplement manned aircraft surveillance and current ground assets to ensure more effective monitoring of United States territory,” Michael Kostelnik, assistant commissioner at Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection Bureau, told the House Transportation subcommittee.

This is Hoover’s America, not mine.

ITMFA, my new favorite site.

They should make a shirt out of my motherfuckin sign, though.

is also the culture of lies.

Howard Kaloogian is a GOP candidate running for office in California. He put up this bit picture on his website showing a photo from his “trip to Iraq” of “downtown Baghdad,” purporting to show how peaceful the whole thing is and how the MSM just wasn’t showing all the good news coming out of Iraq (JMM’s original post):

One problem: it wasn’t a picture of Iraq. It was a picture of Bakirkoy, a suburb of Istanbul. That’s Turkey to members of the reality based community.

Once again, we have a perfect example of today’s GOP in action: there is no self-serving action that is not worth lying, cheating, stealing, slandering, libelling, or breaking the rules for.

Update: more on Kaloogian and who exactly has their hands shoved up his mannequin hole. Short answer: Move America Forward

He flipped the bird – while in church! – to his critics.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia startled reporters in Boston just minutes after attending a mass, by flipping a middle finger to his critics.

A Boston Herald reporter asked the 70-year-old conservative Roman Catholic if he faces much questioning over impartiality when it comes to issues separating church and state.

“You know what I say to those people?” Scalia replied, making the obscene gesture and explaining “That’s Sicilian.”

The 20-year veteran of the high court was caught making the gesture by a photographer with The Pilot, the Archdiocese of Boston’s newspaper.

This comes on the heels of his speech regarding the rights of prisoners at Guantanimo (for which he must recuse himself from a couple upcoming cases. Think that’s likely?), of course.

Some say Scalia is losing it. I think Scalia’s feeling his oats. He’s created this world with the bullshit Bush v. Gore 2000 decision and now he’s letting his disdain for the people and love of authority show. Wow, what a great time to be an American.

Update: it wasn’t the bird as American’s know it, it was the chin flip while saying “va fangul”. Same diff.

Given the GOP’s nationalist, jingoist, reactionary, racist proposed bill this week that would make helping an 80 year old across the street illegal if she were an undocumented alien. This unamerican, unchristian, inhuman bill is one of the biggest disgraces of our recent congressional history.

Well, the immigrants and libs heard about it too.

Joining what some are calling the nation’s largest mobilization of immigrants ever, hundreds of thousands of people boisterously marched in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to protest federal legislation that would crack down on undocumented immigrants, penalize those who help them and build a security wall on the U.S. southern border. Spirited crowds representing labor, religious groups, civil-rights advocates and ordinary immigrants stretched over 26 blocks of downtown Los Angeles from Adams Blvd. along Spring Street and Broadway to City Hall, tooting kazoos, waving American flags and chanting “Si se puede!” (Yes we can!). The crowd, estimated by police at more than 500.000, represented one of the largest protest marches in Los Angeles history, surpassing Vietnam War demonstrations and the 70,000 who rallied downtown against Proposition 187, a 1994 state initiative that denied public benefits to undocumented migrants.

Given our gilded age, I’m sure this will have as much effect as the worldwide demonstrations against the Iraq invasion. Don’t these GOoPers know who provides all the essential services they rely upon? They cook their meals, they drive the ambulances. They connect our calls. They guard us while we sleep. Do not… fuck with them.

and the further destruction of privacy.

The NYPD is installing 505 surveillance cameras around the city – and pushing to safeguard lower Manhattan with a “ring of steel” that could track hundreds of thousands of people and cars a day, authorities revealed yesterday.

The police cameras will constantly keep watch over neighborhoods plagued by crime and monitor potential terror targets as the city moves to put another 1,200 cops on the street, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

I know practices such as these have been going on in Europe for years, but watching as our country becomes increasingly totalitarian and fascist is depressing. The State always couches new information/tracking mechanisms in the cloth of “safety,” and given the current bedwetting climate seeking a Big Brother to watch over them, I don’t think they’ll meet any resistance. Next will be the RFID trackers with the lights to correllate citizen movement with permitted and proscribed activities. Show us your papers!

Wolcott has more.

200 years as a nation, and it only took the Busheviks 5 years to destroy our Constitution. Aided and abetted by a complacent Congress and a sycophantic, approving media.

Bush has been illegally adding caveats to Congressional laws – and we know it’s illegal because the Supreme Court has already ruled on the line-item veto, and adding a rider that “the preznit will not pay attention to this” is no different. The Bush administration has decided that the Executive has all the powers of the Legislative and Judicial. If this isn’t precisely what Madison warned against in the Federalist paper 47, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.

The reality is that the Administration has been making clear for quite some time that they have unlimited power and that nothing — not even the law — can restrict it. But here, they are specifically telling Congress that even if Congress amends FISA and the President agrees to abide by those amendments, they still have the power to break the law whenever they want. As I have documented more times than I can count, we have a President who has seized unlimited power, including the power to break the law, and the Administration — somewhat commendably — is quite candid and straightforward about that fact.

Greenwald’s noting this again is nothing new, of course. In some ways we have the frog boiling problem (where the actions are too slow to realize the danger until it’s too late). In others we have people who are unable to comprehend just how audacious and authoritarian this government is; I think Krugman was the first to mainstream the radical nature of this government. Maybe it was Alterman. In any event, absent a real opposition party, the reemergence of an independent media, the spontaneous development of a spine, moral compass, and integrity in the GOP Congress, our country as we once knew (and mythologized) it is dead.

A new study just came out that revealed just how mightily open minded the ignorant mythology-obsessed monkeys of this country are.

American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology.

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

I think at least part of the problem here is the lack of human understanding for nothingness. Sure, nothing is just the flip side of something, but absence? void? vacuum? Inconceivable! Much more is fueled by religion’s innate need to control and eliminate opposing viewpoints, human insecurity, and basic tribal behavior, but I still think that null fuels much of this enmity.

Famous American atheists? Mark Twain, Isaac Asimov, Ernest Hemmingway, Arthur C. Clarke… and so on.

This addiction to the opiate of the masses is disturbing to rationalists such as myself. Quick! Where’s our next fear hit! Commies, fags, and atheists, oh my!

After years of teams not recognizing what he can do and focusing on what he can’t, Hee Seop Choi just landed with the team that will best appreciate him. If given a starting role, he’s going to go apeshit on the league this year, y’all. He’s wayyy better than the 1B pikers the BoSox are running out there now, and his top comp is David Ortiz.

I wish the M’s were run by Epstein and crew.

Red Sox claimed first baseman Hee-Seop Choi off waivers from the Dodgers.

With 2 nearly free moves, the BoSox have just set themselves up for continued success for the next 3-4 years. Manny and Ortiz are in their 30s, and with Pena (24) and Choi (27), the cover for the decline phase is now in place. Crisp = Damon, only 7 years younger. The only place they punted was 3B with Marte, but the CF need was more dire in the short term. Add in that Choi makes only 750k this year and Pena a bit more and you’ve got yourself a performance *and* financial winner. Just some great moves here.

Fire Bavasi, fire him now.

Looks like the plagiarizing nepotista entitlement box turtle baby ben has been sacked.

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday.

An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately.

I’m sure he meant “resigned” resigned. Couldn’t happen to a more worthy individual.

Not only has the WaPo blown all credibility with their continued employment of Bob Woodward, and their GOP-mouthpiece status throughout the Clinton & Bush administrations, now they’ve decided to “correct” the “liberal” bias by putting up a right wing blog by 24 year old Ben Domenech.

I figured this was par for the course; the kid’s a home-schooled idiot, dropped out of W&M college, and thinks that Ann Coulter is the height of discourse. He is also a medal winner in the non-enlisting in the armed forces wing of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, who also used his special status as a Puerto Rican to receive massive amounts of wellfare for his college years, and does not believe in evolution. We’ve been calling him “Box Turtle” Ben because he continued the repressed homo weird conservative obsession of bestiality by comparing the acceptance of gay marriage with people fucking box turtles.

In short, he’s a whiny entitlement baby whose mouth is much bigger than his convictions. His one claim to fame is that he was a co-founder of the faux right wing community site red state.

… buuuuut his dad worked hand-in-hand with Jackoff Abraham, so the Post decides to offer balance (to what?) and hires this mental midget to put up a third-rate blog on a formerly first-rate paper.

That’s fine, I thought. He’ll be well-paid to be an ignored, ignorant blowhard who just repeats RNC talking points and calls Coretta Scott King a “communist” while saying that Red Dawn is one of the greatest movies of all time and comparing the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. He’s also a racist bigot who dreams of death to all “liberals” (read: those who oppose Bush). You know, garden variety worthless nutjobby. Not coincidentally, I didn’t care because I thought that his idiocy would bring even more people to the progressive side, much as using that Stalinist Cockburn on the WSJ editorial page did for conservatives.

Today, however, it is revealed that not only is he an unthinking dittohead parrot… he’s also a plagiarist. Multiple times. He’s scrubbing all of his old posts wherever he can, but the Internet is awash with a captured trail of massive plagiarism. The WaPo can put whatever mouthbreathing knuckledragger they want on their opinion pages, but plagiarism cannot be countenanced.

Too bad about that whole Internet thing, huh, Benny. Really a kick in the balls to be shown for the worthless cretin you are. Here’s to the hoist currently residing in your petard region.

There are tons of links all over for this stuff; throw a rock, you hit 3 people finding new articles that Box Turtle plagiarized (best part is that he even plagiarized the box turtle line from his own comment section). Here’s a few:
dKos, Your Logo Here, Firedog lake, dfire…