Author: photog

Moneyball (2011) – A Movie Review

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Moneyball is a somewhat fictionalized story about how Oakland Athletics’ General Manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) brings advanced statistical analysis (sabermetrics) to the management of a major league baseball team.

When the A’s are beaten in the fifth game of the 2001 ALDS series by the New York Yankees and subsequently the Yankees and Red Sox steal away the two best players on the team (Jason Giami and Johnny Damon) through free-agency and the A’s owner tells Beane that there is no money to replace these stars, Beane searches for a way to overcome the unfair disparity of his team’s poverty.  Beane discovers a young statistician in the Cleveland Indians management team; Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) who understands sabermetrics and brings him to Oakland to help him compete for the American League championship against teams like the New York Yankees who have three times the salary budget.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The movie chronicles Beane and Brand battling with the team’s scouting personnel and the A’s manager Art Howe (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) while being crucified in the press and social media by fans and pundits because of the unorthodox trades and policies that they institute.  Everything is based on what statistically will reduce the number of outs and produce more runs and more wins.  They forbid players from bunting or stealing bases.  The assign a badly injured catcher (Scott Hatteberg portrayed by Chris Pratt) as the team’s first baseman because he has a slightly higher on base percentage than the All-Star first baseman they already have.  They hire a pitcher who can only throw in the 80-mph range because his price tag is a bargain.  And the first half of the season is a catastrophe.  But Billy sticks with Brand’s system and before the end of the season the A’s gel as a team and even break the record for longest winning streak in AL history (twenty games).

But of course, statistical success is a long-term concept and in a short series like the playoffs big money still buys baseball heroes who hit lots of home runs in October.  And the A’s lose in the playoffs again.  But their success with the meager resources provided catches the attention of more well-funded teams and the owner of the Boston Red Sox; John Henry offers Beane an unheard-of salary of $12.5 million to be general manager of his team.  Ultimately Beane remains in Oakland for personal reasons (being close to his daughter) but sabermetrics wins over major league baseball and is now the standard method for building a team in baseball.

I’ve read that many of the entertaining details of the story are fictionalized.  And I can believe that.  But this is a movie not a history lesson so the real question is whether the movie entertains.  And the answer to that (in my opinion) is absolutely.  Pitt portrays Beane as a former player who has a grudge against the scouting system that lures kids, who won’t be successful baseball players, into the game.  He gave up a full scholarship to Stanford to play for the Mets and then wash out.  He sees a scientific evaluation of players as the way to avoid all the chaos that, in his view, the scouts seem to cause.  Pitt has a good script and he makes the most of it.  And Pitt and Hill have a very amusing Mutt and Jeff relationship with the confident Beane mentoring the awkward and inexperienced Brand in how to work with the athletes.  Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe gives a disgruntled old-timer portrayal that fits the story well.  And there are more than a few very strong performances among the actors portraying the scouts and ball players.  All in all, it’s a very interesting baseball story and I think well worth the time to watch it.  Highly recommended to baseball fans and movie fans in general.

Tom’s World – 29AUG2025 – Chaotic Input

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The thing about highly ordered systems like the social system of a large country is that they can only take so much disordered and chaotic input. And if the insanity forced down the nation’s throat over the past 12+ years doesn’t count as chaotic input, I’m not sure what would short of a total collapse.

I think that in a future in which social science has evolved from a pretend science for average or less intelligent people to waste money getting degrees in to a real evidence and calculation based science, one of the social real scientists would point to these happenings and say in consternation, “Well, what did you expect?”

29AUG2025 – The End of an Era

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I clicked on the link to the ZMan’s website to check out whether anymore comments appeared on the his last post and found the above copied error message from his webhosting service.

So that’s that.  It finalizes a sort of empty place in my internet routine that is now reinforced by corporate schedules.  A bank account is emptied, a bill isn’t paid and a website disappears.  And the world moves on.  I guess we all leave a small footprint when all is said and done.

Hail, hail and farewell.

The ZMan has Died

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Trans-Terrorism

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Someone called Robert Westman (aka Robin Westman) took a bunch of guns to a Catholic church where the local Catholic grammar school was celebrating a Mass for the first week of school, barricaded the doors and then started shooting the children and the adults at the Mass. He killed an eight- and a ten-year-old and wounded about a twenty other people. When the police showed up, he shot himself to death.
So, this is an all too familiar story and one more familiar detail is that Robin Westman was transgender, in other words, he was pretending to be a woman. He left a manifesto and other records and among other statements, he was tired of being “trans.” And he admitted to knowing that he was mentally ill and what he was about to do was wrong and evil. But he declared that he just wasn’t able to overcome the urge to murder these children.
If you look through the video and written articles, I’ve attached here you will be reminded that there have been a number of mass shootings by transgender individuals. And I think it is fair to say that there is at least a subculture in the “trans-community” that view mass murder as a reasonable or even a desirable action by trans-people who feel aggrieved by traditional organizations like the Catholic or other Christian churches or just the public in general for not making their lives the wonderland that they were promised by the doctors and social workers who wanted to amputate or otherwise remove their genitals.
Now none of this is surprising. When extremely disturbed and delusional human beings are constantly told that their delusions reflect reality by healthcare experts like psychiatrists and other medical doctors, but when the majority of people avoid them like the plague, eventually the transgender people will assume that those avoiding them are hateful bigots who are morally responsible for the pain that the transgender are feeling. And so, they see no choice but to end their pain and take some of those responsible with them. And who better to punish than eight- and ten-year-old children. Or maybe the real targets are their parents. There are probably few tragedies worse than having a young child murdered.
So, here we are. Every year, or even every few months we get another transgender school shooting. But what is the FBI doing about it? Some of these shooters are associated with Antifa and all of them must be linked through internet groups that incubate these ideas. Is the FBI only good at tracking Republicans? And why isn’t the federal government putting pressure on the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to restore transgenderism to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a mental health condition? In that way, “affirming” treatment can be eliminated and treatments that work to bring the patients back to reality could be concentrated on. After all, the surgeries and the hormone treatments are currently largely responsible for the depression and despair that afflict these people. They’ve been told that these treatments will magically transform them into the opposite sex. When this fails to occur depression and anger are inevitable.
For most of us the transgender people are a small problem. Their irrationality and creepiness are jarring parts of the modern world but something that we escape when we go home to family and friends. But to the parents of school shooting victims, they are a terrible scourge. And for this reason, it behooves President Trump to focus his team at the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate why these attacks are happening so frequently and in such similar ways. There is an organization behind this and it must be identified and eliminated. That is clear to me.

 

 

Trans-militants and their supporters