I know a lot of you are new to the dish – welcome, thanks for stopping by – so here’s the point of this post. On most Saturdays, I put together two sets of links, one to everything I wrote for my day job over the last seven days, and another to interesting articles (originally just five, but that’s more of a minimum now) from the same period, usually about non-baseball topics like science or food. Comments are welcome as long as everyone’s civil, and I’m always taking suggestions for links for the next post.
I was as busy with baseball posts as I’ve been during any previous Thanksgiving week, with five over the last five days:
* The Josh Donaldson trade
* Arizona signing Yasmani Tomas
* Boston signing Pablo Sandoval
* Boston signing Hanley Ramirez
* The White Sox’ and A’s’ signings from last weekend
I’ve also been updating my offseason guides/rankings, with the top 60 boardgames ranking before I went dark on Twitter and the favorite cookbooks guide right after.
And now, the weekly links:
- At this time of year, many people with disposable income will think about giving money to charity – it’s the holiday spirit, or maybe just advice from the accountant. NPR’s The Salt has a great piece up on what goods to donate to food pantries. A little thought goes a long way. Food pantries can always, always use money, which, since I seldom buy canned foods anyway, is my preferred method of helping – and since food pantries focus on small, achievable goals, they’re among the best places to donate.
- Two good pieces I read this week about Ferguson, Missouri, and the murder of Michael Brown: This piece by Prof. Carol Anderson from the Washington Post, arguing that the core issue is “white rage” against racial progress; and a piece from the British left-wing paper The Guardian, annotating the grand jury decision with critical notes on subtext.
- The Embryo Project at Arizona State tweeted me this link to their site, on Charles Darwin’s study of embryos as part of his argument in favor of evolution as the mechanism behind the origins of species. Speaking of which, this graphic plotting countries’ GDP against what percent of their populations believe in evolution is distressing. But there’s good news – ornithologists discovered a new bird species on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
- A little basic for this crowd, but this Washington Post piece reminds you not to ask for antibiotics when you have a cold.
- A powerful piece from the New York Times by a mother, remembering the Thanksgiving her then two-year-old son spent in intensive care.
- Maybe it was buried by Ferguson and the holiday, but the news that Alaska’s Mount Pavlof went boom again this past week should have gotten a lot more play. The eruption column reached nine miles; by comparison, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which was so powerful that it lowered global temperatures for the next year-plus, reached twelve miles.
Perfect timing. Just last night, I asking my wife if she had any idea how Europeans reconciled evolution with their religious beliefs. She works for Bayer and her German coworkers tend to be very religious. They were shocked at how little time off is given in the US for religious holidays even though they all work for the company (one week each for Easter and Christmas in Germany v. two/zero days in US).
Thanks for the link to the graphic.
Interesting how the Twitter-based evolution discussion turned out. It’s too bad that the most tolerant and informative voice was silenced. I work in a natural history museum and love baseball, so I found it intriguing that a nationally beloved former player revealed such deeply rooted, uneducated opinions in an open public forum and didn’t get a slap on the wrist. So it goes…
Thank you for sharing the WaPost piece about Ferguson. I was born on MLK Jr’s birthday (actual, not observed) and have always cherished his social awareness and peaceful demeanor. I hope to see a positive change in the spirit of MLK Jr sound through my children’s generation and beyond.
You are probably already aware of this, but here’s why it’s good that you don’t buy and eat a lot of canned food: http://nosilverlining.org/downloads/NoSilverLining-Report.pdf. As always, thanks for the links and all of your work.
Sorry for being that guy, but according to the article you linked to, the plume was 9 km in the air, not miles. 9 km is about 5.5 miles.
@Joe: Oh, sorry, I misread it. I may have just assumed it said “miles” because I’m a red-blooded American (#sarcasm).
Keith, can you really refer to the death of Michael Brown as a “murder” when a grand jury, who examined the evidence much more closely than you ever will, felt otherwise? Seems irresponsible on your part.
It’s irresponsible to call Michael Brown’s death anything but murder.
Keith,
Murder is defined as the premeditated and unlawful killing of a person. So by definition, Michael Brown was not murdered.
For those commenting on the Michael Brown sentence, I don’t know what word is appropriate. The grand jury proceeding may have been tainted by prosecutorial misconduct of a different sort (detailed in the second link); either way, we never got the benefit of a jury trial, which is normally how we say whether a crime was committed. And even so, don’t we refer to the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman as “murders,” without much thought, even though no one was convicted of such a crime? If Darren Wilson ends up charged and convicted with violating Brown’s civil rights … good grief, I don’t even know what the word for that would be. And that’s why I say I don’t know what word is appropriate. Calling me “irresponsible” is histrionic to the extreme. I just don’t know what to call it.
I believe the correct term is homicide, the killing of a human being. Murder, at least in criminal law, refers to the unlawful homicide of a human; premedititation is not required for a homicide to be classified as a murder.
Keith, thanks for your reply. The reference to the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson is slightly misguided. It is absolutely clear that she was murdered. The open question is by whom. There is no debate as to whether her death was or was not a legal killing. It was murder.
By contrast, Michael Brown’s death was not murder. It is a killing to be sure. But not murder; it was not illegal – by virtue of the grand jury decision.
‘It was not illegal – by virtue of the grand jury decision.’
By this logic the lynching of African Americans in the South wasn’t murder since juries didn’t convict the accused.
I’m going to continue to say Michael Brown was murdered.
Barry, this shows a lack of critical thinking.
Actually, Barry’s response is an excellent example of critical thinking – the reductio ad absurdum, if I still have my fallacies correct. Emmett Till was murdered; his killers were acquitted, and despite admitting they kidnapped him, they weren’t indicted by the grand jury for kidnapping.
As for the Nicole Brown Simpson murder, there seems to be no question of who did it. The issue there is that the prosecution failed to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
Basing a claim of possible prosecutorial misconduct on the Guardian’s annotations is quite a position.
Several of those annotations fail to consider the converse of McCullough’s actions on the criminal prosecution process. These include the claim he made the grand jury “plow through” evidence as well as the really speculative questioning whether witnesses were interviewed because none were quoted in media reports. If the Guardian can question his motives based on their own annotation, I’m going to question theirs based on the same — repeated references to McCullough’s distaste for the media give that away. He’s a prosecutor, not a public relations hack.
More generally, there is no benefit to a jury trial after a decision not to indict. Indeed, more than a benefit, that would be illegal. I’m supposing you meant “benefit” in the context of pulic access to proceedings, which is a fair point. Either way, I don’t think there’s been any evidence of misconduct to rise to Nifong levels.
Keith,
Thanks for your response. But if you think about Barry’s example closely, it doesn’t hold. In the case of a lynching, there’s no doubt that the death was premeditated and intentional. By contrast, the death of Michael Brown was not premeditated (no disputing this) and happened in the line of police activity (I.e., nowhere near the same level of intention in a lynching). A grand jury or jury in the old south in that context is a far cry from the grand jury in the Ferguson situation.
Also, minus 10 point for using such a provocative, racially charged example to try to prove the point he was trying to make – which was simply that just because a grand jury (which you are inferring was crooked) decided not to proceed, it’s not necessarily proof that it wasn’t a lawful killing.
Bottom-line: there’s room for debate as to whether the grand jury made the right decision. But if as you said earlier you aren’t sure what word to use (murder, killing, death, etc), you would think you would err on the side of not saying it was murder, don’t you think?
Enjoying the lively and thoughtful debate.
Garrett – Public access? The benefit of a jury trial is a full adversarial proceeding that is better suited/designed to determine actual guilt. Grand juries don’t do that. And in this case, the prosecutor’s presentation to the grand jury was unusual and peculiar considering it is his job to get the indictment.
In the context of my using “public access,” I was speculating on why Keith would state that the public never had the “benefit” of a jury trial. It’s one possible explanation for why a jury trial would have been beneficial, but that justification can’t hold if a grand jury doesn’t indict a suspect. So, while your statement is true generally, in the context of this matter (and knowing the grand jury’s decision), that benefit is impossible, since prerequisites to the condition that would merit a jury trial were not satisfied.
As to why the particular conditions were not satisfied (a suspect being indicted), I think it’s fair to second-guess the prosecutor’s approach. I don’t know whether his approach was strictly speaking unusual or peculiar since I’m not a Missouri prosecutor. I think reasonable minds could differ. But we’ve now moved from “possible misconduct” to “unusual and peculiar,” which are different measurements.
And while his job is to secure indictments, there are limits to his power and credibility in the face of eyewitness, forensic, and circumstantial evidence as interpreted by the grand jurors. That is one reason why I referenced the Nifong example. It was his job to seek an indictment as well, and he did so improperly. Ultimately, while a prosecutor does seek indictments, he can’t wish those to happen. Many sources have detailed the voluminous grand jury testimony and highlighted reasons why those jurors did not return a true bill (for example, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/01/witness-10-proves-darren-wilson-had-a-reasonable-belief-he-needed-to-shoot/?tid=pm_pop).