I had a few Insiders posts this week, starting with the top 50 draft prospects, along with the list of the most prospect-laden minor league rosters, and a scouting blog from games earlier this week on Erick Fedde, Josh Staumont, Dansby Swanson, and Braxton Davidson. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday to tie it into the draft rankings.
And now, the links…
- Fusion looks into the shadowy world of “IP mapping,”, and God help you if the companies that do this use your house as a default address for thousands or millions of IP addresses.
- This incredible four-year-old New Yorker profile of a Michigan dentist who cheated at marathons resurfaced this week as a link in a NY Times story about a triathlon competitor who also stands accused of fraud.
- How can NPR survive in a world shifting towards podcasting? NPR’s core audience is aging, and they’re slow to adapt … but I’d still take their newscasts over any other single source in the United States for balance, thoroughness, and acknowledgement that there are more than five countries in the world.
- On the heels of last week’s longread about sugar vs fat in our diets, the director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Functional Medicine describes his conversion from a low-fat diet to a “paleo-vegan” diet, built primarily around plants but without skimping on fats, even some saturated ones.
- Yes, of course President Obama can just appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. I think that’s what the GOP is hoping he’ll do, so they can call him an autocrat and drum up support from their base.
- The BBC’s Trending column examines the right-wing troll who encourages followers to dox her critics. She’s married to an Illinois police officer, and claims she’s been harassed offline as well. The author describes this as one example of the “culture wars” online, and sure enough, a troll followed the publication of this article by creating a fake account designed to look like the author’s.
- A man who claims to be on the U.S.’s “kill list” for drone attacks describes what it’s like to be hunted, and how many innocent people have died in four failed attempts to kill him. Drone attacks are too palatable – as long as none of “our” people die, it’s all good, right?
- Brigham Young University treats sexual assault victims as criminals themselves, subjecting them to “honor code” investigations, with expulsion – yes, expulsion for being raped – among the possible outcomes. “Honor code” is just another way of victim-blaming, of course, and here it comes at a university founded by and named after a racist, abusive polygamist (he had 55 wives). The school’s actions violate Title IX rules and are now endangering a rape prosecution, but administrators don’t seem to see this as a problem.
- The Republican majority in Congress is trying to undo Net Neutrality by stripping the FCC of some of its regulatory powers and President Obama is having none of it. This puts the Republicans, historically the party of business and of capitalist policies, on the wrong side, favoring a few very large companies over an open-market solution that should encourage more innovation and more small business growth.
- People with anxiety disorder appear to have fundamental brain differences from those without.
- Rappers discuss their histories with depression in a surprisingly candid piece at VICE.
- Good stuff from FiveThirtyEight’s sports department: They examined a Joe Sheehan hypothesis about older hitters struggling with the game’s increased velocity and found no evidence to support it, even looking at it from a few different angles. Joe floated the hypothesis in his email newsletter, to which I have subscribed since day one, and recommend highly.
- The Tampa Bay Times reveals how many Bay-area “farm to table” restaurants lie about the provenance of their ingredients. This is horrifying on many levels, not the least of which is that these restaurants are outright lying to customers.
- Vacciner deniers aren’t stupid, says this Atlantic piece, arguing instead that it comes from parents feeling “powerless” in the face of mandates. I think that’s stupid. Vaccine-denialists are overwhelmingly practicing extreme selection bias in what they read or believe, and if that ain’t the definition of stupidity, well, maybe I ain’t that smart.
Eye in the Sky was a pretty good movie about a drone strike. I’d recommend it to anyone interested, but I don’t know how accurate it is.
I hope you are being facetious when you say “Yes, of course President Obama can just appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court”, because, of course, he cannot.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/04/11/can-president-obama-appoint-merrick-garland-to-the-supreme-court-without-the-consent-of-the-senate/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/04/11/no-president-obama-cannot-appoint-merrick-garland-to-the-supreme-court-if-the-senate-does-nothing/
You have posted some aggressively stupid articles in this section before, but that Merrick Garland thing takes the cake. Truly astonishing that anyone could read that, conclude that it is reasonable, and then endorse it by posting a link/endorsement of it on one’s personal blog. I’ll let The Atlantic take it from here.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/supreme-court-merrick-garland-appointment-impasse/478233/
1. Is it necessary to be such an asshole while offering your pseudo-correction? You know, the one you were too lazy to write out yourself?
2. All it takes to make a legal case is a plausible argument. Not necessarily a correct argument, but a plausible one. And that is what the original WaPo piece was really about–finding a plausible basis for getting the question before a tribunal other than the Republican-dominated Senate. Once you do that, or even threaten to do that, then maybe you break the stalemate.
I second CB’s thoughts on the tone here.
I could have expressed myself much better in the post, but 1) this was a longer than normal list of links this week and 2) I didn’t get back from Georgia till about 1:00 this morning, then had to rush to get this post ready before heading out to a family event.
I found the topic interesting because, as I said, I think the GOP would love for Obama to move in that direction so they can rally their base against him and resume their longstanding attempts to depict him as some sort of overreaching, would-be autocrat. I also based my thought that this was a possible move for the President on this ScotusBlog post on recess appointments.
Charming.
All this talk of trolls and no postings from Doug Thompson? Kind of a letdown.
Give him a minute, he’s still asleep.
That article about food labeling is impressively detailed.
For some inexplicable reason I read the comments also. This is by far my favorite:
“I cannot have soy, becuase of my breast cancer. We try to eat healthy, but soy is even in chocolate and Stella Doro Breakfast Treats.”
That is spectacular. There’s no wrong time to eat them!
Hey Keith, first, love your work on ESPN and here. Do you have any thoughts on counter top ovens? it’s just two of us now, and I hate to heat up the oven for small amounts out food. Thanks
Toaster ovens or something larger? I do own a toaster oven but rarely use it; I tend to plan meals around whether the oven will be on, and then use it for multiple courses or to cook something ahead for the following night. I’ve always assumed that toaster ovens are less efficient anyway, although I don’t know for sure if that’s the case.
Keith, what do you think about universities handling rape cases on the whole?
With regards to the BYU situation, it seems (to me) that the university has 4 avenues of action that they could pursue:
1) Remove any reference to alcohol/drug use from the honor code: Seems like a nuclear option for the university, and certainly going to be an impossible ask from a conservative, traditional privately-funded institution. I think that they would have a legitimate argument that they are entitled to create rules (which may be stupid, as long as they are not illegal/racial/sexist) for their own operation. There is an appeal for students to attend institutions that create learning environments without the traditional social atmosphere of the American college experience.
2) Give a safe haven in rape cases: Would probably be a much better option, especially to protect students. The (and this may be begging the question/false attribution/false dilemma) argument may be that students may fabricate false claims in settings where impending institutional consequences of honor code violations may be occurring. A student drinks/does drugs, the university catches wind of it, and the student retorts to making subsequent false claims of sexual assualt knowing that the university will not pursue the original charges against the student.
3) Continue with the current standard: I mean, it’s apparent why punishing students for reporting rape is a stupid idea.
4) Referring all matters to police: Personally, I don’t understand why more universities don’t do this. Rape is a criminal offense, and should be treated as such. As an aside, I was on the honor and professional council at my graduate university. We heard more than a handful of cases of sexual assault. Quite frankly, neither we, nor the university, knew what the hell we were doing. We were told that the standard of evidence was not videos, toxicology reports, or even subsequents ED visit reports (which were all barred from entering testimony), but rather just victim/aggressor statements with witness corroboration.
On more than one occasion, the victim happened to be a failing student that was given a leave of absence, or the crime occurred after a test/assessment failure that required that the victim be removed from the program due to academic violations.
Long story short, this isn’t just a problem that occurs at BYU… is there a better way to handle these cases, specifically by turning them over to local police?
I agree wholeheartedly that colleges should turn these matters over to the police – that they should be required by law to do so, in fact. (When is institutional failure to report a suspected crime acceptable? If there’s a rape at a Nike factory in Oregon, can they just handle it themselves? I don’t think so.) But colleges want to handle these matters internally because reporting the incidents would create publicly trackable statistics on sexual assaults, and then we’d learn just how many rapists are crawling around BYU and Tennessee and Baylor and Kansas and at the evangelical Patrick Henry College. I’d bet it’s a shit-ton more than they want us to realize.
Thanks for your work. I enjoy your links on mental health, specifically anxiety. Could you recommend any books, articles, or websites that have been particularly useful to you on this topic? Thanks so much.
Yes, the book Fully Present is by far the best resource for learning how to deal with anxiety. I recommend it constantly.
Reading the description of “Fully Present” on Amazon, I’m not seeing how it relates to anxiety. Do you recommend it for people who themselves are dealing with anxiety as a potential avenue to better self-management? Or for someone in a relationship with someone dealing with anxiety who wants to better understand his partner? I’m in the latter category and someone who so rarely feels anything even approaching anxiety, that I sometimes struggle to understand the very real experiences of those who do have to face it head on.
It’s for people with anxiety. It discusses how the mind races (a huge part of anxiety) and how to slow it down via meditation.
Any recs for someone in my position? That explain anxiety well to “outsiders”.
Thanks so much, I will check it out.
FYI that BYU issued a statement today saying they are going to “closely study their policies.” Hopefully it leads to change, but I’m skeptical.
(Fixed the formatting in your comment.)
I hadn’t seen that, but I’m as skeptical as you are. This is a church, if not an outright cult, and they have a long history of protecting their organizational interests over the individual. I’d be floored if anything short of a federal order changes their behavior.
Gah, I just emptied the spam folder and noticed too late that one of you left a legitimate comment on this post (“I’m not so horrified by the farm-to-table article…”) that ended up in spam. I’m hoping you see this and resubmit because I did not intend to delete your comment. Sorry!