Stick to baseball, 2/17/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covered the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft, in advance of yesterday’s opening night in Division 1. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday. Unfortunately I did not recover enough from whatever ailment I had this week to make the trip to Myrtle Beach, but hope to be on the road next weekend.

I reviewed the board game Seikatsu, one of my daughter’s new favorites, here this week, with another review hitting Paste‘s site next week. Also, I never tweeted this link at all, but reviewed the Romanian-language film Graduation, from Oscar-nominated director Cristian Mungiu, on Wednesday.

Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! Some readers have reported difficulty finding the hardcover version in stores, but it is still available on amazon at the moment.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Outline looks at Delaware’s opioid crisis, mentioning a high school in the district where we live (which has a local reputation for such things). Does any state not have an opioid crisis? And is there anything states can do to stop it without support from the federal government?
• WIRED looks inside the last two years at Facebook as the company faces criticism from multiple sides for its part in promulgating fake news and, in the words of one former executive, “ripping apart the social fabric.”
• Lawfareblog breaks down what the latest indictment from Robert Mueller’s office means — and what it doesn’t.
• Buzzfeed talks to Aviv Ovadya, Chief Technologist at UMSI’s Center for Social Media Responsibility, about the imminent potential for technologies that can quickly create and disseminate new levels of fake news, including forged audio and video that could make it appear that world leaders said things they never said or did things they never did.
• This November post from Rantt Media looks at how backpropagation, often mislabeled as “AI,” threatens millions of jobs, and what policy prescriptions we might enact to mitigate its effects. The idea that this is happening no matter what, so we should change our funding priorities, is very different from the “how do we stop this?” conversation that dominates instead.
• An Indonesian province on the island of New Guinea that is home to the world’s biggest gold mine is home to a measles outbreak and widespread starvation among natives whose traditional environment and way of life has been destroyed by the mining companies with the full compliance of the Indonesian government.
• Nigeria’s massive oil industry has long benefited foreign investors and a tiny local elite rather than enriching the country as a whole, which is the most populous country in Africa. The son of one of the country’s billionaires opened a window on how little the industry helps the Nigerian population when he tried to invest in European oil and gas assets, exposing how difficult it is for most Africans to participate in the wealth generated by natural resources. He’s no hero, but he inadvertently showed how badly the west takes advantage of former African colonies to this day.
• EPA head Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier who is thoroughly unqualified to head the agency, has wasted tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on first-class travel … because taxpayers accost him over his disastrous policy decisions when he flies coach.
• Have you seen tweets or reports that the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre was the 18th school shooting in the U.S. this year? It wasn’t. That number comes from a gun-control advocacy group that counts any gun-related incident on a school campus as a “school shooting,” even if there wasn’t a threat to students.
• Of course, deaths by firearm are still one major reason the U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born in.
• This Paste op ed is from November but could run weekly without ever seeming out of date: Ban Assault Weapons, Idiots.
• If you live in California, be aware that a group of cranks and pseudoscience advocates are pushing a ballot initiative to overturn the state’s mandatory vaccination law, remove fluoride from water, and more under the innocuous-sounding name “California Clean Environment.” All this would do is damage public health, especially for children, to satisfy a few charlatans who profit off the ignorant.
• I know you’re shocked, but former Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has been accused of hiding profits from Miami-Dade County, claiming a paper loss on the sale of the team (for $1.2 billion) that let him avoid paying a portion of the proceeds to the county.
• Cobb County ripped off its taxpayers to fund a stadium for the privately-owned Atlanta Braves … and now the county can’t even fund its existing libraries. The county also opened a new $10 million “cultural center” despite lacking a sustainable operating budget for the facility.
• West Virginia is run by industries busy destroying its environment, including the oil & gas industry. A Democratic candidate in the state’s 7th District tried to read the names of sitting state legislators with how much money they received from oil & gas companies and was physically dragged from the floor, especially since she dared point out that committee chairman John Shott (GOP) took $40K from First Energy. How crooked is West Virginia’s government? The governor hired a gas company board member for an undefined role in the state house that gives him 24-hour access to the Governor’s Office.
• Marie Newman is a Democrat running in Illinois for a seat held by another Democrat, Dan Lipinski, because Lipinski has supported so many right-wing positions, including voting for a 20-week abortion ban, voting to extend the government’s right to warrantless spying, voting for a permanent ban on the use of federal funds for abortions, voting against a minimum wage hike, and voting to expand the death penalty. Lipinski has long enjoyed the support of labor unions in his gerrymandered district, but several broke with him in the last three weeks to support Newman.
• The songwriters behind the 2000 3LW song “Playas Gon’ Play” sued Taylor Swift over the lyrics to her song “Shake It Off.” She won … because the judge ruled that the lyrics in question were too unoriginal to warrant copyright protection. I think this adequately burns both sides.
• The Washington Post hired Koch Brothers mouthpiece Meghan McArdle to write for its editorial page, even though she got caught fabricating data to support an argument against the Affordable Care Act.
• That wasn’t even the worst editorial page move of the week; the New York Times seems determined to drive itself into a ditch with recent hires and columns, including the hiring-and-immediate-firing of neo-Nazi apologist Quinn Norton. Justin Charity wrote for the Ringer about the paper’s seeming desire for self-immolation. I cancelled my digital subscription on Monday over the paper’s decision to run a column from climate change denier Bret Stephens that claimed the world is “smearing” Woody Allen, whose stepdaughter says he molested her.
• Researchers at Rockefeller University may have discovered a new class of antibiotic compounds by sifting through dirt. Malacidins were effective in laboratories against many multi-drug resistant Gram-positive bacteria, including MRSA, by binding to calcium compounds that would eventually go into bacterial cell walls.
• You can retain new material you learn more effectively if you take a short break of doing absolutely nothing after studying it.
• Board game news: Calliope Games announced the long-delayed arrival of its three new Titan Series titles, including Ancestree, on retail shelves. Ancestree was among the best light games I played at Gen Con last year; it’s from designer Eric M. Lang, best known for heavier games like Blood Rage and the forthcoming Rising Sun.
• Bezier Games released Palace of Mad King Ludwig to retail about three weeks ago; it’s a standalone sequel to Castles of Mad King Ludwig, but dispenses with the earlier game’s odd shapes and now has all players working on the same building with square tiles of differing values. Bezier’s site still says “pre-order” but it’s on amazon for $43.
• Gen Con ticket sales are already outpacing sales from last year, with the event, held August 2-5 in Indianapolis, on course for its second straight sellout. I intend to be there the whole time, as I was last year.