My first attempt to project this year’s first-round picks went up on Wednesday; I’ll do this again three times before the draft, with the next one coming after Memorial Day. Earlier in the week, I did my annual ten-year lookback pieces, one on redrafting the 2006 first round and the other on the first-rounders from that year who didn’t work out.
I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday, and have a new game review up at Paste on the light family-friendly card game Zany Penguins.
Thanks to all of you who’ve signed up for my newsletter. I send a note more or less whenever I post new content somewhere, and usually add a little story or extra content too.
And now, the links…
- A longtime reader of mine, Travis, has an unfortunate story that he shared with me: His newborn daughter is already in hospice care after a bout of meningitis that hit after she was born at 27 weeks. The full story is on their GoFundMe page; I donated and encourage you to do the same.
- Amazing longread from the Atlantic on the false certainty we get from DNA results in criminal cases.
- Great blog post on the challenges of fighting vaccine-denial propaganda. I guess the good news is that the film Vaxxed has gained no traction outside of its core, cult-like audience.
- This piece on dating from a woman who does not want children has one really infuriating passage, about men who tried to impregnate her against her wishes. In the UK, that’s considered rape, but in the U.S. I don’t believe it is.
- As yet another sports … uh, figure? … used the term “pansy” this week to describe baseball without broken limbs and bloody faces, I thought I’d link to The Pansy Project, in which a gay artist plants a single pansy at the sites of homophobic comments or attacks, joining with the recipient in a sort of show of strength. “Pansy,” by the way, has referred to either a gay man or an overly effeminate one for over a hundred years.
- The Washington Post‘s oral history of the making of Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way” is a must read for anyone who remembers the impact that song had on the musical culture of the day. It’s surprising and disturbing for me to hear cries of racism at MTV; I grew up in about as white a town as you’ll find on the eastern seaboard, and when MTV aired anything by black artists that wasn’t adult contemporary crap, I devoured it. Rap, Prince and his various protegées, Living Colour, it didn’t matter. If it was novel, I was interested.
- Also from WaPo, from March, the story of a violin prodigy who stole a Stradivarius.
- An ethics professor at Yale and major figure in the social justice movement in academia stands credibly accused of sexual harassment. And Yale hasn’t done much to stop him.
- The New Yorker takes a serious look at the buffoon James O’Keefe, and what his brand of negative campaigning means for both sides in the 2016 Presidential election. (Hint: Nothing good for democracy.)
- Yes, it’s about a colleague, but I still enjoyed Josh Levin’s piece on why Zach Lowe is the best sportswriter in America.
- A rare bit of positive news in the fight against antibiotic resistance, thanks to a five-year experiment in building such molecules from scratch rather than modifying existing ones.
Surprised of the glaring omission of the Post piece on Native Americans telling white people to live their own life and quit pretending to care for political gain. Can’t pretend to be a credible news curator while filtering massive stories, Keithy boy.
I didn’t put it here because I discussed it in chat on Thursday and on Twitter. If you can’t speak to me in a civil manner, however, I would ask you to refrain from commenting here.
Thanks especially for the link to the Atlantic article on DNA evidence. I’m not far from Houston and the lab there is in the news at least once a week. I’m glad the problems are getting some national attention.
Sometimes sunlight is the best disinfectant, right? At least I hope it is. Not much else I can do.
You are a clown
Well at least you didn’t call him an idito.
He didn’t have the brains for that, Pat.
While Vaxxed may have peaked as a newsworthy phenomenon nationwide, its poisoning influence has just begun, as the filmmakers (Wakefield himself curiously excepted, at least here in Atlanta) are schlepping the film around the country and sponsoring grass-roots meetups in conjunction. My favorite local theater announced their arrival for four weekend screenings/Q&As last week, which has metastasized into a full theatrical run, now held over for a second week. I imagine the same scenario is playing out elsewhere.
And these folks and their true believers Do. Not. Play. I invite you to take a look at the theater’s Facebook post announcing the original Q&A. I made the initial comment in protest of the screening, whereupon (after a significantly protracted amount of time for a social media post…as if it got noticed well after the fact and then marching orders were given) I was thoroughly set upon. What can I say, I tried my best:
http://tinyurl.com/jgohqfe
Re-reading the responses to my comment now, I see that some of the more incendiary remarks were deleted (you can see me respond to one person who called me a “madman”). Not all of them, though!
Good for you for speaking out, though. I think the cult relies on people like us staying silent or backing down.
Lowe’s podcast is also a must-listen.
About the movie Vaxxed… Why would any free speech ever be limited? Can’t we as humans be allowed to decide what information we want to consume, or do we need to be told what information we are allowed to consume?
Well who is limiting? Private actors — be they viewers or theater owners, acting collectively or individually — are free to choose what speech they engage with, actively listen to*, support, endorse, empower, and how they ultimately respond.
Vaxxed being rejected by most viewers or denied screen time by theaters or other broadcast routes is not a limit on free speech.
Any particular venue is a platform with limited capacity. Protesting a particular venue’s decision to devote part of its limited capacity to perpetrating a fraud on the public is countering speech you dislike with speech of your own.
I’m speaking about Vaxxed being pulled from Tribeca. How does that promote democracy and freedom of speech? Heavy handed censorship is always BAD! How could watching any film be bad?
Hollywood will show blood, guts, murder, etc… Show an alternative view on our medical paradigm, oh no, we can’t have that????
Smells fishy, like I’m standing at the wharf fishy…
Did the government prevent it from being shown? Because I don’t know how freedom of speech and democracy have anything to do with this if not. Private enterprise can decide whether to show things on it’s own, like what happened here.
Chad, you do not understand freedom of speech at all. This is simply not a First Amendment issue. The government isn’t involved. The film was made. There has been no censorship.
Also, this is not “an alternative view on our medical paradigm.” It’s fraud. Andrew Wakefield committed serious academic fraud and was stripped of his license to practice medicine.
New mail subscriber here. Stick to James O’Keefe! 🙂 (Thanks for that link, quite a story on that clown.)
It’s shocking that a far left social justice warrior is full of poo and used the movement for his own perverse pleasures. Totally shocking.
Initially, I thought the Gretzky trade worked out OK for Edmonton as they won a Stanley Cup two years after he was traded and made the Conference Finals two consecutive years beyond that. But that entire franchise was loaded enough with so many good players beyond Gretzky an immediate collapse was certainly not in the cards.
Looking closer at the deal, the primary return was cash: $15 million. The rest was one role player, one very good player who wanted out of town a year after the trade and three first round picks (of which none spent much time with Edmonton). So…yeah, that probably didn’t work out so hot. Indeed, after 1992, the Oilers didn’t make the playoffs for four straight seasons, when you would think the returns of a good trade for a generational talent would bear fruit. I think my favorite part of that whole saga is Canadian politicians being so outraged they called for the government to block the trade. This concludes your hockey history lesson for today.
A Trout trade likely doesn’t happen because a team would have to gut so much of their future (and possibly present) to get him. His value is almost too high for a trade partner right now. Seems like a year or two would have to go by for him to be flipped.
Keith, did you read today’s article by Michael Wilbon in the Undefeated on the lack of interest by African-American athletes in advanced analytics? I felt like I was reading a 75-year-old baseball writer lamenting the good old days of RBIs, productive outs and “grit.” So many misconceptions and faulty reasoning, so little time.
Here is a direct quote from Deniro about having the movie pulled:
“Well, what I learned, first of all, there was a big reaction, which I didn’t see coming, and it was from filmmakers — supposedly, I have yet to find out who it was. I wanted to just know who they were, because to me there was no reason not to see the movie. The movie is not hurting anybody. It says something. It said something to me that was valid. Maybe some things were inaccurate, but if the movie was 20 percent accurate, it was worth seeing. And they were saying it’s because of the filmmaker and he was discredited, but how was he discredited? By the medical establishment? There’s a lot going on that I still don’t understand, but it makes me question the whole thing, and the whole vaccine issue is a real one. It’s big money. So it did get attention. I was happy about that. And I talked about another movie called Trace Amounts that I saw and spoke about it a lot, that people should see it, and it’s there. Something is there with vaccines, because they’re not tested in some ways the way other medicines are, and they’re just taken for granted and mandated in some states. And people do get sick from it. Not everybody, but certain people are sensitive, like anything, penicillin.”
So De Niro didn’t read up on why the film, and it’s producer, is so wrong and controversial? Throwing out some bogus statistic that it is “20% accurate” doesn’t add anything to his argument. Neither does questioning “the medical establishment”. It just kind of shows that he doesn’t know much about science and only highlights his ignorance of it. The movie would have done better if it was correctly categorized as science fiction instead of as a documentary.
The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that a guy who poked holes in his condoms prior to sex with his girlfriend (who had insisted on safe sex) had committed aggravated sexual assault.