High-wage jobs

The rich get richer, with the Dodgers adding Kyle Tucker

Pro sports has been, at least since free agency became a thing, an industry that pays well. For the big leaguers, I mean. Minor league players toil in poverty, for the most part, excepting highly-touted prospects that got big signing bonuses or whatnot. But if you could make the Majors (or your sport's equivalent high rung), you'd get paid. And if you were a star player, well, then you could get seriously rich.

But such things are relative, and with today's announcement of some new Major League Baseball free agent contracts it got me going down a bit of an historical rabbit hole.

Outfielder Kyle Tucker, late of the Houston Astros and Chicago Cubs, is a really good baseball player. Any team would love to have him. Is he the best baseball player? No, I don't think anyone could credibly make that argument, though he is more well-rounded than most, good at several things rather than elite at one or two (looking at you, Aaron Judge). Nonetheless, the Los Angeles Dodgers just made him the highest-paid player in the game not named Shohei Ohtani (who is a special case and cannot be used as a comparison with anybody, not just for what he does on the field but because he is responsible for so much of his team's income). The annual average value of Tucker's new contract is a staggering $60,000,000. There's some creative structuring of when he'll be paid how much over time, but bottom line, it's $240 million for four years playing as a Dodger. The previous record-holder is the similarly-aged and similarly-skilled Juan Soto, who set the mark just a year ago when the New York Mets (who shelled out another high-dollar contract today for shortstop Bo Bichette) gave him $51,000,000 per annum. Before that it was Aaron Judge breaking the mark in 2023, getting $40,000,000 a year from the Yankees.

Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge elite athletes getting paid. It's a comparable amount to what the star of a hit TV series would make (at least back in the days of 22-episode TV seasons), and it's all ultimately in the entertainment field. I'm just stunned at the rate of player-salary inflation versus the general rate. When Kirby Puckett got $5M in 1993, he was the top dog; adjusted for inflation, he was getting less than a fifth of Tucker's new paycheck, and no way is Kyle Tucker five times the player Kirby Puckett was.

Nolan Ryan got the first $1,000,000 per year contract in 1979. I remember clearly when Orel Hershiser became baseball's first $3,000,000 per year player ten years after that. I recall Ken Griffey Jr. breaking the $8,000,000 per year mark in 1996, and that his figure was eclipsed by Albert Belle's $11,000,000 annual contract later that year. Not too many years after, Manny Ramirez would top $20M and A-Fraud would top $30M and Mike Trout would top $35M. Then Judge, Soto, and now $60M with Tucker.

At first I assumed the sports fan was taking more of a hit every time the big contracts got way bigger. Though it's true that ticket prices have gone up more than the general rate of inflation would indicate, they haven't risen to the same degree, not even close. We pay about three times as much for a ticket today than we did back when Griffey signed his $8M-per-season deal, not the sixfold jump Soto sees over Junior's pay. (Though there's also the matter of having to pay for TV broadcasts we didn't used to have to pay for and ever-increasing cable fees—which, thankfully, are finally dying off in favor of more a la carte streaming options—so it's not quite apples-to-apples.)

What I haven't been able to research is how much increase there's been in the revenue the league and its teams bring in. It's likely that individual clubs have always been far more profitable than they've publicly acknowledged, and especially in the Rob Manfred era they sell ad space and naming rights on/for anything they can and have soaked television providers so heavily that some of them have gone bankrupt. Almost every team now has a stadium with luxury seating options that didn't exist in 20th century ballparks and that now account for most of the gameday revenues.

So in terms of percentage of the employer's income, these huge contracts probably have kept fairly consistent over the years? Maybe? At least through Trout's record-breaking 2019 deal?

Nevertheless, I remain stunned to consider these guys getting $50 and $60 million a year when I'd just gotten used to the top guys making $35M. It's psychologically jarring when the vast majority of us are seeing our buying power get smaller and smaller even though the scales and circumstances don't equate.

Also, it makes me nervous because Manfred and his bosses, the MLB club owners, are notoriously dishonest about their finances and unwilling to share anything even with each other, and the collective bargaining agreement MLB has with the players' union expires next December 1st. With the fat-cat teams like the Dodgers and Mets and Yankees and even the Cubs shelling out contracts like this, the rest of the owners are going to cry poor and Manfred will saber-rattle and we'll have a lockout come Spring Training time 2027. My faith in Manfred's ability to keep the peace is not quite absolute zero, but it's close.

Tagged Baseball, Rob Manfred, Posted on January 16, 2026 at 10:04PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Mélange of miscellany

Kudos to the great people of Minnesota, who go out in the cold to document the fascism

Rather than pick a topic and dive in I'm going with a potpourri of assorted notes on various things today...

Dateline: Occupied Minnesota

• The campaign of state-sponsored terror continues in occupied Minneapolis, and thankfully the good people who live there are out documenting it. One video made it to the cablewaves of the Chicago-based allegedly-centrist-but-Republican-slanted station NewsNation, which showed it over an interview with Congresswoman Mary Miller (R–IL). Rep. Miller said the woman shown in the video being abducted out of her car while trying to drive to a medical appointment deserved to be manhandled and abused because "she's here illegally [and] probably getting free health care." She later admitted that she doesn't know who the woman is and thus has no earthly idea if she's here illegally or not, but she also says, "who cares? She's breaking the law and resisting arrest." For the record, the woman was later identified as a biracial U.S.-born software engineer and ICE had to release her.

  The video, which is all Rep. Miller had to go on, shows no lawbreaking whatsoever on the woman's part; it shows ICE acting illegally, though, breaking her car windows and abducting her rather than allowing her to move along her way. Was she being arrested for cause? Was she to be charged with something? Would the charge be, say, asking an ICE patrol why she was being hindered from traveling to her appointment? That's the "lawbreaking" Rep. Miller sees and says "who cares?" about? This interview is the first and thus far only time I've ever seen Rep. Mary Miller, I'd never heard of her before, but it's plenty sufficient to reveal her as a racist, authoritarian abettor of criminals with no respect for law or her oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. In a sane world, she would be censured, removed from committees, or even expelled from the House by her fellow Congresspeople for what she said in this interview.

  Miller represents a gerrymandered district created in the 2020 redistricting that moved Illinois 15 from the southeastern corner of the state to a rural expanse in the center that is nearly bisected by population centers. If you live in Decatur, Springfield, or Champaign, congratulations, you are not Miller's constituent, though you are completely surrounded by those who are. If you live in East St. Louis, Bloomington, or Peoria, you're less than 20 miles from IL–15. The 2020 census took a seat away from Illinois, necessitating a redistricting, and the state redrew its map to group cities together as much as possible in a "fight back" gerrymander. It gave the state three more Democratic seats in the House but eliminated toss-up districts and made the three remaining R districts deeply, deeply Republican. This new blood-red district had two incumbents, one holding the seat lost in the census, and its voters reelected Miller over the more moderate R and then overwhelmingly reelected her again. Congrats, IL–15, you people are batshit crazy. At best.

• In another incident on Monday, ICE agents kidnapped a black woman, a U.S. citizen, in occupied St. Paul. It wasn't clear if the damage to her car seen in the video was caused by ICE or not, but rather than assist someone after an automotive collision of some kind the agents abducted her, threw her into an unmarked vehicle, and drove off.
• Also Monday, ICE agents abducted two teenage employees of a Twin Cities area Target store, tackling one of them to the ground and beating him, only to dump them out of the unmarked vehicle, bloody and sobbing, eight miles away when they were satisfied that the teens were American citizens. (Video is on X, so I'm not linking it. Screw you, Elon.)
• Three Minnesota school districts (and counting?) are now accommodating remote classes as it is unsafe for students to attend school. ICE has abducted parents, tear-gassed playgrounds, and generally terrorized various Minnesota schools this month in their alleged quest to deport immigrants.
• A Minneapolis resident, abducted by ICE for following an ICE vehicle and alerting neighbors to ICE's presence—agents stopped her car, broke the driver and passenger side windows, and forced the two occupants from the car—said that while being forcibly taken in an unmarked vehicle to a nearby Federal building agents told her, "you guys have to stop obstructing us, that's why that lesbian bitch is dead." The threat, the misogyny, the bigotry, the callous disregard for law, the small-minded insecurity, all there in one quote from a government-sanctioned thug during an illegal arrest. Before being released, agents apparently offered at least one of the two abductees money if they would name or identify other protesters.
• Congresswoman Robin Kelly (D–IL 2, south Chicago suburbs) has spearheaded a move to impeach Kristi Noem over her use of ICE thugs in Minnesota and elsewhere. More power to you and your colleagues, Rep. Kelly. It won't succeed in this House, but I applaud the effort and want to see more of this. Just because Speaker Johnson won't allow such things to be voted on doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing them every damn day.
• An activist in the Netherlands was given a list of more than 4,000 names of people working as ICE agents or support personnel. He put it online. Since these people have no business trying to hide their identities in the first place, I'll link to it. The site is slow to load, I imagine it's getting a bit of strain put on its server.
• I look forward to the massive number of lawsuits that will eventually be filed against DHS, the least of which will be a plethora of demands for financial restitution for property damage to the various cars agents have rammed, broken windows of, sliced seatbelts in, and, you know, shot.

The hot stove league

• With the signing of free-agent third baseman Alex Bregman, the Chicago Cubs have bumped incumbent third-sacker Matt Shaw to the bench. Shaw is a MAGA ideologue who left the team to attend the funeral of Charlie Kirk and again during the pennant race to go to a MAGA rally in Arizona. Thus, when the Bregman signing became official we got this outstanding post on BlueSky:

  

  Our buddy Craig Calcaterra followed up on that with this sentiment:

  I suppose Shaw will now be a super utilityman. Which makes me REALLY want the Cubs to acquire a better utilityman such as Santiago Espinal or someone like him so Shaw can be replaced, in the same offseason, by both a Jew and a Latino guy. That'd probably break his fascist ass.

  Schadenfreude for the win.

• The Kansas City Royals are the latest team to do something stupid with their field dimensions. That's my bias, of course, that it's stupid. The Royals are moving the fences in at Kaufmann Stadium, shortening the alleys between the foul poles and dead-center field by ten feet. Not satisfied with that, they are also making the fence height 18 inches shorter. KC's general manager, J.J. Picollo, claimed he wasn't "trying to jump-start our offense," which is silly, of course he is. But the thing is, Kaufmann has always been a great hitters' park. It just hasn't been a great home run park. Especially in the days when it had AstroTurf, but even with grass, KC's was a terrific park to hit doubles and triples in. A big outfield means potentially fewer homers, but it also means more base hits—outfielders have more ground to cover, balls are going to fall short of their positioning or go over their heads more often than they would in smaller outfields. Also, a curved symmetrical outfield wall meant any roller that hit the wall had the opportunity to hug the wall as it rolled on rather than carom back to an outfielder. I haven't seen whether or not they're trying to keep the curvature of the wall, but no matter what it won't be as prevalent since the degree of curve will be lessened. This is a move intended to make home runs easier to hit and to thus encourage batters—Royals and opponents—to keep up the dumbness that has made for less interesting baseball since the post-strike 1990s. That is, the all or nothing, "three true outcome" style offense that has reduced balls in play, skyrocketed strikeouts, and massively devalued defensive skill, particularly for outfielders.

  I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Home runs are boring. Compared to most other ways to score, unless it's a walkoff ending a game, a homer is dull. It's a flash-in-the-pan event, a potential rally-killer, while a string of base hits keeps pressure on the pitcher and the defense. Other than a bases-loaded walk/hit batter, a balk, or, god forbid, a pitch timer violation, the home run is the least interesting way to score. Teams ought to be doing what the Orioles did a few years back and making their outfields bigger. Encourage more contact, encourage smart baserunning, make outfield defense important, and above all, make the game less reliant on brute force. Rob Deer was an interesting player because there just weren't very many Rob Deers. Nowadays every team has at least two of him. The world champion Los Angeles Dodgers had five players top 120 strikeouts in 2025. Five! (Your Seattle Mariners only had one, which is a big reason they were so much better in ’25 than in prior seasons.)

  I realize I'm never likely to see a team like my beloved 1985 Cardinals ever again, but can we stop trying to make baseball dumber? Please?

• The Washington Nationals are the latest team to ditch their cable television contract, leaving the Mid Atlantic Sports Network and turning over their TV rights to Major League Baseball. The cable TV model is quickly dying and I am here for it. What remains to be seen is how MLB is going to be handling the various teams (now including Your Seattle Mariners) they need to televise. Presumably they will find a cable outlet in each of the markets they can pipe feeds to, but really the need is in streaming. Because Commissioner Dumbass shot himself in the foot trying to extort a better playoff TV deal from ESPN, he ended up losing revenue and to try and make up for the loss in the short term sold ESPN the streaming rights for what had been MLB.TV. Until very recently, MLB.TV was only meant for subscribers to watch out-of-market teams and that's what ESPN now has control over; whether MLB will retain these individual teams' in-market streaming rights or lump them in with the ESPN deal is unclear. We'll find out in a couple of months. Regardless, the death of the cable model means an end to the stupidity of making it difficult/impossible for local fans to watch their own team without paying through the nose for a cable/satellite package. That stupidity remains for playoff games, though, so there's still a ways to go. But it's more evidence that Commander Data was right in Star Trek: TNG when he mentioned that broadcast television didn't last in any significant form beyond the year 2040.

Site tweaks and email issues

• I have succeeded (I think) in eliminating the duplicate email problem with the new daily update email subscription thing. However, I have in the process discovered that the emails being sent have a moderately high spam score. This is mostly because the system is intended for a lot more stuff to be in the emails than I want to include, and thus they go out with a lot of blank lines in the formatting. Lots of blank lines are suspicious to spam filtering algorithms. So I would ask any who like receiving the updates-via-email to add *@starshiptim.com to the whitelist in your spam filter of choice to prevent the emails from going into your junk folders unseen. If you don't know how to do that, just ask me, I'll walk you through it.
• I have always disliked WordPress as a platform, and these days, while I don't exactly hate it with the fire of a thousand suns, I heavily discourage anyone from using it unless there are mitigating circumstances of some sort. This site, obviously, has nothing to do with that platform and never will, and my reasons for eschewing it are many. One of them is that the WordPress platform has become ubiquitous, it's everywhere, and thus bad actors—hackers, phishers, malicious billionaires, etc.—target WordPress sites specifically to do their fuckery. They target other sites too, of course, but there's a reason an entire subindustry of WordPress repair and protection services has popped up over the years. Anyway, with that in mind it should not have surprised me to find in the data from my recent experiments in bot-fighting that many of the malicious bots attacking this site are specifically trying to find WordPress login pages and file structures. Shouldn't have, but it did. In a way, it's comforting—it reinforces the belief that bots and their operators don't do subtlety. They're kind of like Rob Deer, really; brute force, swing hard and either get the homer or strike out. So, another thing to cite in my ever-present recommendation that if you use WordPress you should move to something else (I'll help you, my rates are good!), and if you're thinking about starting a WP site to think again.

Tagged Politics, ICE, President VonClownstick, Republicans, Baseball, Site issues, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on January 14, 2026 at 9:29PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Even more tweaks

In my continued war against the AI robots, I have been pleased to see one element of the Cloudfare service becoming well worth the effort of connecting with it: The "AI Labyrinth."

For a while I was getting annoyed at the fact that certain bots that I had successfully prevented from accessing stuff here had, according to my standard traffic logs, come back after linking up with Cloudflare. That's the opposite of what I was trying to accomplish, after all. But I did a bit of cross-referencing with all the new data and found that while, yes, those bots were being allowed back in, they were lured in only to be hooked by a sneaky line and pulled into a trap off-site. The labyrinth is a swarm of nonsense and links to garbage designed to keep the scraper bots busy scarfing up completely useless crap while they go in circles, thus wasting their resources. Karma, you bot bastards!

It took a little while for the labyrinth to kick in on this site, as it's relatively puny and not heavily trafficked. But I implemented it elsewhere on a couple other sites today and damned if it didn't start kicking in within an hour. Those poor saps were being inundated and it took no time at all for the lures to get bites.

I had (very) briefly considered setting up my own bot trap, but aside from inflicting annoyance on the bot operators, it wouldn't help; hosting a bot trap is self-defeating as it by design consumes a lot of bandwidth. So I'm happy to be using someone else's likely far more effective one.

So, positive developments on that front.

Not so positive on the RSS feed/email subscription front, though; having had to leave the perfectly fine email program I'd been using because Cloudfare screwed with it, I now have a digest email thing going via "mailer lite." It is playing very nicely with all the security tweaks here, so that's good. It also sent out a duplicate email today, which is not good. That's annoying and starts to get into spam territory, which is no good to anyone. (Apologies to those of you who received it.) I would recommend using the feedrabbit service I mentioned on Sunday, but after making the necessary DNS changes to accommodate Cloudfare, feedrabbit was hit with the entire RSS feed of the site going back years and went a little bananas with its emails. That triggered an anti-spam thing that made it too switch to only sending out a daily digest rather than an update whenever there's a new post. So... oops.

I'm working on making this new thing work the way it's supposed to and not send duplicate mail. Your patience is appreciated.

Meanwhile, as always, I recommend setting up your own RSS feed reader or browser plugin or Outlook folder or whathaveyou to follow not just this site but any others you like. Then you won't need to sign up here. But I know people won't do that, so I plod on with the email thing.

Tagged Site issues, Posted on January 13, 2026 at 8:00PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Umpire Diary

I'm a week into the Winter League with my umpiring gig. I thought I might start posting notes on the experience this year; we'll see if it remains interesting enough to continue as the year progresses. But for now, some bits and pieces...

• Firstly, unlike prior winter league seasons, it's not just me and basically two other guys vying for shifts. Everyone wants hours now, even though it's 39 degrees and wet out there. Hard to argue with that, everyone needs extra dough in the age of the Felon47 crash-and-burn economy. But it's disappointing to me because I'm getting two shifts a week, which translates to four or five games. I'd rather have three, or six or seven games; I could use that extra hundred bucks a week and I would get to see my favorite players more often.
• Speaking of favorites, last night I got to see some, including boku no ichiban suki na senshu, who generously provided me with hot cocoa and baked goods. She's awesome. (She also homered with a fly ball that hit the foul line and evaded the left fielder. Sugoi.) The evening prior I had another fave team, called Pitch, Please!, and razzed the Orioles fan wearing the Jim Palmer jersey for striking out and thus batting like a pitcher. Which, unfair, as Jim Palmer had 13 extra-base hits in his 19-year career, which is likely 13 more than any of us on the softball field could manage in the bigs. Anyway, great to see Megan, Joel, Wyatt, Ray, Aidan, Owen, Emma, "Oil Can" Boyd, and the rest of the gang from Sunday and Monday evenings.
• Last Wednesday night's action I don't remember much of, because that shift was dominated by my having to call paramedics to the scene. A gal playing third base took a line drive to the face. It was pretty scary (mostly for her, there was panic for a bit) and very bloody, as many facial lacerations can be. It was severe enough that the paramedics decided it was more than they could handle and they called a "real" ambulance and had her taken to Harborview. Fortunately, I rarely have to call for medical help; I think this was the fifth time(?) in however many years I've been doing this, and I would like for it to be the only time this year. Yesterday afternoon while at the league office I asked if we'd heard from anyone on her team as to her status and no one had followed up! Holy crap, someone dropped the ball there.
• Weird for winter league, I've already had three teams I didn't know, including two that were what we call "indy teams," people that sign up as individuals and are thrown together, many of whom haven't played much softball in their lives. Generally, these are fun groups because they signed up to be social rather than be competitive, and even if they play like they could only ever aspire to the relative success of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, they have fun doing it. Winter league has historically been near-exclusively populated by the die-hards, the teams that sign up all the time and have been around for years, so it's strange to have so many newbies. I can't recall the last winter I had to give the Opening Day Speech more than once, but I've given it three times already.
• The day after my first shift I was seriously feeling my age, as my legs were ridiculously sore. Shows just how sedentary my "off-season" was. Get fitter, you lazy bum.
• Sunday was rainy and unpleasant, which for games at Capitol Hill is actually a good thing in the sense that few other people are using the park. So there was no BINGO! this week:
  

  

No new shifts until Sunday. Stupid economy making people want my hours. Alas.

Tagged Umping, Softball, Posted on January 13, 2026 at 6:13PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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More tweaks

The battle against the bots goes on, and I may have learned enough about the Cloudfare service to make it actually worth something. Unfortunately, doing so gives it some problems when it comes to playing nice with others, and the casualty of the moment is the email updates some of you rely on. So, as another experiment, I am transferring those email updates to a sort of newsletter format using a third-party service. It's not ideal, but it does seem to get around the Cloudfare interference problem.

So, for now anyway, instead of getting an email whenever there's a new post, those of you who are already subscribed will get an email once a day with the latest posts. Hopefully that'll work out, if not, well, more tweakage to come.

This doesn't affect anyone who's signed up via the handy "Get Email Updates" button at the top right here. Those are through the no-frills Feedrabbit service and still work fine. So if you prefer the one-per-new-post email over the once-a-day digest emails, I suggest signing up through that and then letting me know you want to stop getting the digest versions. I can't shift you over to Feedrabbit, that's got to be your own doing.

Thanks for your continued patience. Damned robots.

Tagged Site issues, Posted on January 11, 2026 at 11:59PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Quotes of the day

A few choice quotations from my Sunday reading before I head out to do more umpiring this afternoon/evening...

I know how Congress works. I know that a party in the minority cannot impose their will and that they can't stop what's happening right now. But I do want them to at least acknowledge it and communicate with Americans in a way that demonstrates that they understand why so many of us are being driven to madness and tears at the country being destroyed. I want them to engage in argument and persuasion which meets the moment and which makes it clear that, when the political situation does change, they will act in decisive ways.

This can happen in any number of ways, such as making sure to find the cameras and the microphones to make it clear where they stand when shit goes down. The articulation of a moral stance. It can also happen such as in simply not going along with the Trump Regime in any way whatsoever. Don't vote for things he wants and don't try to find common ground, because finding common ground with a criminal enterprise in a Constitutional crisis only serves to normalize the regime's anti-democratic behavior and to make one an accomplice to criminality.

—Craig Calcaterra

If the American Experiment dies, it will be because we didn’t stop the immorality of a white supremacy that calls Somali refugees “garbage” and a patriarchy that mutters “fucking bitch” as it murders a woman in ice-cold blood. If it lives, it will be because we embraced the higher morality of empathy and compassion for our neighbors—and for people we don’t even know.

—Will Bunch

In my reading of that moment, through everything I know about abusive men and the way they move through the world, that quiet "I’m not mad at you" may have felt like a challenge to someone who needed to be in charge. Because some men don’t hear peace as peace. They hear it as a woman claiming ground that isn’t supposed to belong to her. They hear it as a refusal to be properly afraid. ... 

... I keep thinking about how often women are asked to be the calm in a storm they didn’t create, how often we’re taught to soften danger with our voices and our bodies and our fear, and how often it doesn’t save us anyway.

—Jo Carducci

Trump, until very recently a self-styled antiwar isolationist, now threatens to forcibly revert Greenland’s status to unreconstructed colonialism under a nation forged in high-minded opposition and bloody resistance to that very notion. Why? Probably, judging by his acknowledged fixation on Venezuelan oil and riches in general, for plunder, but also, by his own account, “for national protection.”

That’s funny, because the United States has enjoyed unfettered military access to the island since World War II, when Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany and the United States took Greenland in defense. A 1951 agreement between Denmark and the United States allows the latter to expand its military presence there at will, and the postwar NATO alliance, of which both nations are founding members, obligates us to defend each other.

—Josh Gohlke

You have to love this line from the State Department’s warning [recommending U.S. citizens leave Venezuela immediately]:

“Venezuela has the highest Travel Advisory level—Level 4: Do Not Travel—due to severe risks to Americans, including wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure.”

Did your irony detector just start shrieking? mine did—because you can replace "Venezuela" with "Minneapolis" and not have to change one word in the rest of that paragraph.

—Jeff Tiedrich

And finally, the cartoon that nails the essence of where we are as a nation in the 21st Century: under the yoke of misogynist thugs so insecure in their identities that they're driven to make other people suffer in order to feel better about themselves.

—David Whamond

Have a pleasant Sunday, everyone.

Tagged Politics, Craig Calcaterra, Will Bunch, Jeff Tiedrich, David Whamond, Jo Carducci, Posted on January 11, 2026 at 2:57PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Rage processing

I said at the turn of the new year that I had optimism regarding how 2026 would play out big-picture-wise, but it was a specific kind of optimism—the kind that says we have to go through worse before the better comes, and this is the year when the worse forces us to make the choice to be better. For whatever reason, I was and am still surprised at just how quickly we're careening into the worse.

I still think we'll have turned the corner by the time we get to New Year's 2027, and I'm trying to take a rose-colored-glasses view that the rapidity of the descent into even greater evil by Felon47, his cronies, and his puppet masters will herald a faster and more powerful move to oust them. I see reasons to think that might be the case, but I'm also more aware than ever of what John Fugelsang calls "WTF fatigue."

Every damn day there's a new WTF incident stemming from the fascist regime in DC. Processing all the outrage is a challenge. And it would go along way in aiding the public's mental health if elected officials were more visibly putting up a fight.

In this way, the speed of the regime's further descent into evil is helping because more officials seem to be finally getting it that these are not your grandparents' Republicans, these are rather the enemies your grandparents fought in World War II. But it's not enough, it's not nearly enough. I'm glad to see the statements by some Democratic Congresspeople voicing outrage over Felon47’s Venezuelan smash-and-grab and ICE’s murderous thuggery and the overt obstructions of justice being perpetrated by the FBI of all agencies. I'm gratified to hear state and local officials making it clear that the regime's actions are criminal. But what we need to see and hear are Senators, Representatives, and potential candidates for Federal office demanding impeachments. Promising reforms. Vowing to prosecute.

Instead we still get Tim Kaine and Amy Klobuchar and others voting to confirm insurrectionists to the Federal bench.

We cannot be giving an inch here. The cult is beginning to crack. A significant number of Republicans in Congress seem to be realizing that they're politically better off opposing Felon47 on at least some things—nine of them helped Democrats succeed in a discharge petition to force a vote on restoring ACA subsidies and then 15 voted for the measure, even though the Speaker refused to put it up for a vote under normal business; five Republican Senators voted in favor of curtailing Felon47’s military adventurism—and that they have to think about their careers post-regime.

Because one way or another, this regime will end. That's where that choosing-to-be-better thing comes into play, and that should be what Democrats nationwide at all levels of power need to be shouting into every microphone they can find.

In the words of our friend Craig Calcaterra:

America is lost. It's completely lost and it is marching deeper and deeper into darkness every day. We're past the point of mere elections fixing it. It's going to take the prosecution of scores if not hundreds of members of the current regime and the eradication of their evil and lawless works to even begin to put us on something resembling a path back into the light. Like, that's where we have to start to even have hope of a positive future.

We cannot go back. We must forge a new path forward and through. Anyone who promises, with clarity and conviction, to do that has my support. Anyone without the courage to do so does not.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick, Democrats, Republicans, Craig Calcaterra, Posted on January 9, 2026 at 3:25PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Testing 1,2,3...

If you're reading this, congratulations—you have successfully navigated the login page.

Like I said in the earlier post on this subject, I'm not wild about forcing people to log in to see this website, but I've got to find some way to curtail the scraperbots. They just keep coming, and the Cloudfare experiment wasn't mitigating bandwidth usage even though it appeared for a while like it might be. There was some positive effect with it in other ways, but there was also some negative and on balance it doesn't seem to be worth it. Most of what it was blocking were things I was already successfully blocking without it, the only real difference being I had a lot more data about the attempts.

So, now I'm trying this. I hope it isn't too much of a headache for users; it should only be a once-a-month thing for you all on each device you might use, just be sure to check the "keep me signed in for 30 days" box, or else you'll be prompted to log in every time on every page. That would be seriously annoying.

Of course, if my low-tech method of giving login creds doesn't fool the bots, this will be for naught and I'll end the experiment. We'll see how it goes.

 

UPDATE: Too many functionality problems with this, so I'm killing it already. The experiment lasted less than two hours. It was successful in blocking the bots; that worked perfectly, at least in the short term. But it also prevented RSS feed operations and link sharing to social media and various other positive elements. If I ever find a way around that, then maybe I'll try again.

Tagged Site issues, Posted on January 8, 2026 at 9:13PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Domestic terrorism

Domestic terrorist

Unsurprisingly, the response of the Felon47 regime—principally the Secretary of Homeland Security and Felon47 himself—to the murder of a young mother, an American citizen, by an ICE agent in Minneapolis has been to lie their asses off and claim the incident was something entirely different than what occurred in reality.

They are attempting to spin the killing as some sort of justified self-defense action, but if you've seen the videos taken by eyewitnesses you can plainly see that such a spin is, to echo the term used by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, bullshit. Everything in the statements by the DHS secretary and Felon47 is profoundly untrue, though there is a kernel of truth in one of the lies. Secretary Noem said that ICE reacted to a case of domestic terrorism. That is a blatant lie, easily debunked by the video records. But this was a case of domestic terrorism—just not in the way Noem would have us believe. The terrorists were the ICE agents, and the ICE agent that fired his gun repeatedly into the open driver-side window of Renee Good's car at point-blank range committed murder.

ICE has become a terrorist organization. By extension, the Department of Homeland Security has become a terrorist organization. By extension, the executive branch of the United States government has become a terrorist organization.

One of the many, many reforms I think is necessary for our country to recover from this dalliance with fascist thuggery is to undo the biggest mistake of the George W. Bush administration outside of his wars. That administration crafted the new cabinet agency, the Department of Homeland Security, in the wake of 9/11, making it a sprawling cluster of bureaucracies borne of paranoia and with overreaching, careless authorities. It needs to be abolished, its constituent parts returned to their former agencies or erased from existence. ICE in particular needs to be disbanded, with customs and border control and immigration duties reorganized in ways that actually keeps them in their own lanes.

Right now ICE is just the American Gestapo, with DHS functioning as the American Schutzstaffel.

These people have to be stopped. Since the Republican party is corrupt and Republican officials are functioning as accomplices and accessories to countless crimes including murder and outright betrayal of the Constitution, we may well have to suffer for another year before a new Congress can finally take these fuckers down, assuming we can overcome the inevitable Republican attempts to subvert the midterm elections. But that doesn't mean we don't try in the meantime.

Write your Congresspeople. Write your Senators. Call their offices, shout from the rooftops, communicate however you can to those with the power to fix this—and make no mistake, Congress could end this reign of terror today if they chose to—that we are mad as hell and won't take any more.

Impeach. Convict. Remove. Do it now.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, Society, Congress, President VonClownstick, Posted on January 8, 2026 at 12:26AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Experiment insights

The bot invasion continues, but my newest experiments in combat tactics are at least revealing some information. The Cloudfare service I'm trying out is a mixed bag, to be sure, and I'm still not sold on it being all that useful, but it is able to see through some of the bot camouflage. That in and of itself might be helpful in creating IP blocks that actually work. We'll see.

For example, there's a hit in my access logs from about an hour ago ostensibly from Senegal on a certain IP, using Chrome version 103 on Windows 10. It's obviously a bot because it matches certain patterns in my access logs, but it successfully oozed through all the "bots keep out" forcefields and convinced servers it was a human user. The extra layer of filtering reveals that this bot was actually in Venezuela on a different IP, using Chrome 110 (headless, which means no user interface, which means entirely under-the-hood snooping), using or simulating Windows 10. Another hit claimed to be from Mexico on a certain IP and was really from El Salvador on another, pretending to be on a MacOS.

It does appear to be intercepting a lot of bot traffic, but I'm still a bit unclear on what's being reported; a lot of these, I think, are bots not trying to disguise themselves (like Googlebot) and thus hit my robots.txt file and see the "keep out" sign and obey it. These would be stopped anyhow, I'm just seeing more data on it this way. It's also reporting more bandwidth usage than my actual usage seems to be, which hopefully indicates intercepted bots that don't make it through the filter? It's going to take a few more days worth of data to give me any sense of difference its making in terms of stopping bots in their tracks.

Meanwhile, I am also considering turning this site into a "members only" sort of thing that requires a login for anyone to see it. I don't like the idea conceptually, but password-blocking is a sure way to eliminate bot theft. At the moment, I can only assign members manually, from my admin interface, so that's a non-starter. I would need to code a new feature into the site guts to allow people to sign up from outside, and then add stuff to prevent bots from signing up (or at least minimize them). I may have a low-tech workaround for that, based on the idea that bots, especially these newfangled scraper bots, will look for more technical means of defense to thwart and might miss a simpler approach.

How would people feel about being forced to log in? I well understand that the average websurfer has the attention span of a gnat, and that any obstacle might be enough to cause them to move along to something else, but this seems like a simple enough ask. Any thoughts?

I'll try and implement that simple workaround login test tomorrow/later in the week. Can't start on it now or I'll end up losing track of time and I have to be out of here in another hour or so because I start my 2026 umpiring this evening. It'll be cold, the field will be wet, and the teams playing don't include any of my favorites (though no serial troublemakers, either). I'm not exactly excited about it, but it will be nice to be back on the field again.

Tagged Site issues, Umping, Posted on January 7, 2026 at 3:30PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Bot escalation

Futurama's Robot Mafia

The neverending battle continues.

A couple of months ago or so I had landed on a potential mitigating tactic to use against the onslaught of so-called "AI" bots monopolizing the bandwidth here aboard StarshipTim.com. It worked for a while, but those bastards, just like the Borg, adapted, and now the problem is worse than ever.

I am at my wits' end. These (presumably) scraper bots have managed to circumvent all barriers against them by convincingly camouflaging themselves as human users and rarely/never using the same IP address twice. Blocking them has become impractical without taking drastic measures.

In and of themselves, these bot visits aren't debilitating. They are most likely illegal in the sense that the scrapers scouring the Internet to feed large-language-model algorithms don't give a tinker's damn about copyright law, but in practical terms, what's to be done about that? At some point there may be a class action suit or several to take part in, but proving theft is tricky and the operators of these bots know it. But each visit isn't a drain on resources by itself. Cumulatively, however...

Since the calendar turned to 2026, there have been 203 visits to StarshipTim.com, not counting hits from myself when posting and checking comments. 185 of them are from unwelcome bots. Nearly 2% of the bandwidth this account is allotted for the month has been used already by bots. If that usage rate stays consistent, 12-15% of my bandwidth for the month will have been stolen by bots circumventing the "keep out" signs. This is a rather low-trafficked site, so that won't hurt me here, but really there's no reason to think the bots will keep themselves to this pace.

I host other sites on this server too, and the larger/more-trafficked of those are hit much harder. On one such site just one percent of visits today were (probably) human users, the other 99% were unwanted bots stealing bandwidth (and stealing content for their LLMs). Gigabytes of bandwidth have been used on that account since 12:00:01am January 1st, almost all of it bot traffic. Typically, that site will use about 30GB per month; last month it used 110GB (mostly bots), this month it's already on pace to use about 150GB, far exceeding its allowed usage. I've been borrowing bandwidth from other accounts to cover the excess so that one doesn't go offline for violations. The client isn't at fault. Elon Musk and his ilk with their scraperbots are.

Unsurprisingly, there is an industry starting to sprout around fighting the bots. This abuse of the system has given rise to a profit opportunity for companies that will basically envelope a site into its own bubble and charge thousands of dollars a month to mitigate the bot traffic. Useful, I guess, for giant corporate websites where adding a several-thousand-dollar-per-month expense beats the loss of resource to bots expense. Cloudfare at least offers something more affordable for the little guys, $20 and $200 per month services that attempt to filter bots by routing your visitors through their server security first, then sending those that clear to your own server. I wonder about the false-positive rate with such a thing.

This is maddening because it's a new example of our societal profiteering on bad behavior. Take a walk around the neighborhood, see how many homes have ADT or some other security service's sign in the yard/window/whatever. These people pay every month for protection against bad behavior. Nice home you got there; be a shame of something happened to it. Now imagine that a bunch of Techbros were running a systematic campaign of stealth home invasions that copied and photographed all of your possessions while running up your electricity and water bills, and that these invasions happened every day, usually more than once. Now further imagine that law-enforcement didn't care about these invasions, that lawmakers were browbeaten into thinking that these invasions were somehow permissible because they involved a digital computer program that allows for entry into the home, so technically it isn't breaking-and-entering, and none of your stuff is actually missing when you get home, so is it really theft? With all that going on ADT would be set to make a fortune in new subscribers, right? Symbiosis.

I'm actually experimenting with one of these pay services, the smallest scale option, to see if it makes a lick of difference. If it does, then I can offer it to clients as a mitigator, but I don't like it. It feels like letting the terrorists win.

Tagged Site issues, Society, Posted on January 5, 2026 at 8:07PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Rogue nation

Well, yesterday was sure a poor day to avoid the news, wasn't it.

I had made it through my Saturday blissfully unaware that Felon47 had invaded another country in yet another Republican attempt to take someone else's oil reserves. Seeing that news today was simultaneously surprising and not—it's just not something one expects to see regardless, so surprising; on the other hand, Felon47 has already murdered more than 100 Venezuelans on the open sea in the last four months and said stupid blowhardy bellicose things about Venezuela having "stolen" American oil somehow even though said oil is under the ground of, well, Venezuela. So, not surprising.

This latest completely illegal, unconstitutional, and downright dangerous exercise of global ijime is merely the next in a seemingly neverending sequence of impeachable offenses committed by Felon47 and his regime. Still, this one seems screamingly obvious, this one feels so far above and beyond the others even though many of those other offenses are just as serious. This one wipes away any remaining patina of civilization from the United States in the eyes of the rest of the world.

No one in the world can now say with any semblance of reality that the United States is not governed by a dictator tyrant. This invasion of Venezuela, the kidnapping of its head of state and the head of state's spouse, was a dictate. No input from Congress—no one from Congress was even informed, for Christ's sake—no appeal for public support, no attempt to bring international cooperation or even to seek international opinion. This was nothing more than a unilateral decision by the Felon47 regime alone to declare the United States a rogue nation, a global purveyor of terrorism, uninterested in respecting the other nations of the world if it doesn't suit the United States' immediate needs.

You would think that this would be enough, finally, to get even Republicans in Congress to impeach and convict this motherfucker and bring an end to his literal reign of terror. In pretty much any other era of U.S. history it would be; in pretty much any other era he'd have been barred from being president again after last time. But we live in a time when one of the two major political parties in this country is utterly corrupt and in blatant violation of their oaths to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. When this party has thrown its lot in with a con artist, a literal convicted felon, a fraudster many many times over, for reasons that defy understanding.

Any member of either house of Congress that is not calling for immediate impeachment of the president is, at best, falling down on the job (looking at you, Schumer) and at worst a co-conspirator to overthrow the constitutional republic.

When, Congress, when will enough be fucking enough?

 

Posted on January 4, 2026 at 7:19PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

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