Chris Crawford and I ranked and wrote up the top 30 prospects for the 2017 draft, with Vandy outfielder Jeren Kendall at #1. I also wrote posts for Insiders on the Segura/Walker trade, on the Brett Cecil & Andrew Cashner contracts and other moves, and on the Astros’ moves last week. I also held a Klawchat on Tuesday, in advance of the holiday.
Over at Paste I reviewed the new Martin Wallace game Via Nebula, a great, family-level route-building game that we found simple to learn and quick to play.
You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.
And now, the links…
- Some great longreads this week, including this New Republic piece on the ten-year odyssey to identify an amnesiac man.
- Another one comes from Bleacher Report, on Aly Dia, who played one infamous game for Southampton FC and has long been suspected of deceiving club officials about his experience to get that spot.
- One from VICE, a report exploring the connection between the drug Propecia and serious neurological side effects, with some patients committing suicide after taking the hair-restoration medicine.
- And the BBC explores how British police let a serial killer slip through their fingers, likely because the victims were young gay men with drugs in their systems.
- In “depressed rural Kentucky,” residents are worrying about Medicaid cutbacks under the GOP-dominated government. Trump carried Kentucky with nearly double Clinton’s vote total, and five of their six Representatives are Republican, with the lone exception coming from the district around Louisville.
- Democrat Roy Cooper continues to lead the vote count in North Carolina’s gubernatorial election, but Roy McCrory and Republicans are trying to steal it. If you live in NC, call your state reps, regardless of party, and make sure they know you oppose any attempt to subvert the results of the state’s popular vote.
- A Boston Globe op ed urges Washington to get out of regulating organic food, in essence because there’s no clear defintion of “organic.” I’m about 90% in agreement here, but I do think consumers deserve the protection of truth in labeling laws, regardless of which agency is in charge of it.
- London has become a leader in cutting food waste via apps that connect people with extra food – restaurants or even individuals – with people and charities who need it.
- Chef Tom Colicchio talked to Mother Jones about food policy, hunger, and the incoming GOP government.
- An 18-year-old college student in Tennessee has been charged with shooting and murdering his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend while she slept, because she’d ended their relationship. I’m surprised the story hasn’t gotten more coverage – pretty white girl gets killed equals headlines – but perhaps no one wants to ask 1) why he had access to a gun and 2) what this says about our male privilege problem.
- SNL Weekend Update anchors Michael Che and Colin Jost have come under fire for some tasteless (and unfunny) jokes about gender identity, and Paste‘s Seth Simons says they should be replaced.
- NASA’s notorious paper on the EM Drive has finally been published, and claims that the propulsion system – which appears to break Newton’s Third Law – actually works.
- Scientific American wrote in the wake of Trump’s election that he’s as anti-science a President as we could possibly have. Money quote: “A mandate is what you can get away with.”
- Jeb Lund (aka Mobute) has a great piece at Esquire on surviving Thanksgiving by actually going out of your comfort zone and talking to people who maybe don’t see the world the way you do.
- Dementia rates in the U.S. are dropping as the country ages but researchers don’t understand why.
- Why did many Canadian writers, including the ostensible feminist Margaret Atwood, speak out in support of a professor fired for sexual harassment and bullying? You can find more details on the case and the backlash in the Toronto Star.
- FBI data show a rise in hate crimes against Muslims and Jews in 2016.
- Slate argues that Facebook’s problem runs deeper than fake news, which is that Facebook itself is a media company but Mark Zuckerberg won’t admit or accept it.
- Journalist and writer Farai Chideya has a long, thoughtful, somewhat rambling essay on this year’s “call to whiteness,” those who answered the call, and those who chose not to speak out against it.
- Trump won because college-educated whites supported him. Ultimately, that is the question Democrats will have to answer: why they couldn’t capture a segment of the electorate that tends to be more liberal (higher education correlates with more liberal/progressive political views).
- Trump reportedly pledged support to vaccine denialists at an event in August, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
- He also once asked a reporter if it was wrong to be more attracted to his 13-year-old daughter than to his wife, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
- This Philly Daily News op ed explains how Trump & Co. will distract America while looting the country and breaking all manner of rules, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
- Trump continues to piss and moan about press coverage of him, including personally dressing down several reporters in a meeting last week, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet. But at least New York Times columnist Charles Blow called him out on it.
This news is about 10 days old, but former professional football player Andy Woodward says he was sexually abused at his youth club, Crewe Alexandra. Since the news came out, other players who were youth players there during that time also have come forward and also said they were sexually abused. They were all abused by Barry Bennell. In the mid 90’s, Bennell was arrested while on a tour in the US for sexually abusing other kids. He only served four years in jail. He was later arrested in the UK for sex abuse of 24 kids and is serving time for those offenses. Like Penn State, Crewe Alexandra, who have a good track record or developing soccer players for a club it’s size, claims they didn’t know anything about the abuse.
All of these facts draw to mind Graham James, the Canadian junior hockey coach who sexually abused Theo Fleury, Sheldon Kennedy, and many others.
There are many articles on this, including one with many good links at Wikipedia called “English football sexual abuse scandal”. The best article is Woodward’s original story from The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/nov/16/andy-woodward
Jeb Lund is a good guy and you should definitely continue linking to him http://somethingsensitive.com/index.php?topic=7271.0
Jeb is a good guy, and also, he’s made no secret of his past as an asshole.
If, however, you have comments on or criticisms of the piece I linked here, I’d be happy to discuss it. I thought it was entertaining but that its simple thesis was its strength.
He is a lowlife and I think you would have a much different opinion of him if you hadn’t “met him” (online of course) if you had known him before he got doxxed and tried to save face with that awful Gawker post you just linked to above.
No decent person in his or her 30’s would tell another person to kill themselves, or say “fuck niggers”.
I do think it’s instructive to note that in the Gawker post above, which I somehow managed to finish despite how horribly over-written and obnoxious it was, Lund never manages to really delve into what it is he did as a “troll”. He’s trying to omit the details of his depravity, because he knows that polite, liberal, anti-Republican online culture (yourself included) would NEVER excuse encouragements of suicide, or use of the word nigger, or use of the word faggot, or jokes about child rape. And he’s right. He wants to apologize for something nebulous (i.e. he’s a jerk) as opposed to something specific (he calls people niggers and talks graphically about raping children).
I’ve met Jeb in person and spent time with him. I think calling him a “lowlife” is both inaccurate and unhelpful to the discussion here.
Also, while I don’t use or condone any of that language, you’re talking about a message board with unverified, context-less quotes, and a pretty clear agenda of going after a bunch of people they don’t like from the SA forums. I would never link to a post or article using that kind of language … probably. But I also just recommended The Sellout, which is full of the n-word and lots of other terms you’ll never hear come out of my mouth or keyboard. In this case, I linked to a column he wrote that I thought made a salient point and included none of that language. You still haven’t said anything germane to the column – only about him.
Excellent reading list this week. The Esquire article was an interesting take on living in bubbles. Applies to “liberals” and “conservatives.” Most of my friends are Hillary supporters (as am I) but I also used to consult to various DoD organizations and got a lot of “Obama is the worst president ever”. A few people with differing viewpoints than me could explain why they disagreed with the President and Democrats. It was civil, for the most part. It also helped filter out people who could think clearly vs. those who just liked to holler.
Thanks. I’ve seen a lot of ‘takes’ on our personal infobubbles lately, but most seemed almost … scolding? The question in my mind is how we get people out of those infobubbles. I have a HS friend who is Jewish (by birth, at least) and was an ardent Trump supporter. Showing him stories that connected Trump to anti-Semitic figures, or posts from hate-watch groups that called Trump’s ads or campaign anti-Semitic, did nothing.
I recall (somewhat poorly) a principle we talked about in a social psych class. Presenting “shocking” evidence to people against a core belief tends to actually strengthen that belief, because it causes the person to [at least internally] attempt to refute that argument, as they attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
The “Trump won because x” pieces are getting a bit tiresome. When attitudes are this down-the-middle divided, pick your pet variable and you can call it determinative. Everyone is right!
The criticism of Jost and Che seemed to go too far. It seems to me the author has created a subject which cannot be joked about: The path the Democratic party has taken to carve out a well deserved niche for the LGBTQ community. I understand that the fear factor in this community is high after the campaign Trump waged, but the SNL guys are not applauding that path. I felt like the comments Che made were the most nuanced look I’ve seen regarding race and what the world looks like. He’s figured out a way to live in a world with racism and not hate everybody. The reaction to these guys reminds me of this story.
https://thefederalist.com/2016/11/23/brooklyn-grocery-store-played-sweet-home-alabama-everyone-lost-minds/
Humor has to remain topical and there should be no limits. Weekend Update is not the news.
there should be no limits.
So you’re okay if SNL tells rape jokes? Jokes about child molestation? Child murder?
We can argue about where the limits might be, but I don’t think the position that humor should have “no limits” is tenable. There are some subjects so inappropriate or offensive to enough people that making light of them on national television is a bad choice.
Keith, you just called someone who used the n-word, told people to kill themselves and made a joke about child rape a good guy in a comment above. I’m confused about the distinction.
I don’t share JC’s view that humor should have “no limits,” but I do think the joke in question was not particularly problematic. There’s no question that Democrats tend to be hyper-sensitive about race, gender, sexuality, etc. And there’s no question that such sensitivity angers many Republicans, who are often hyper-insensitive. When I heard the joke live (well, not live, but tape delayed on the West Coast), I didn’t laugh, but I also didn’t find it offensive, because I thought it was poking fun at this state of affairs (Dems are sensitive, Reps are not), and not at peoples’ gender identities.
Sure, you can tell jokes about those things — it just depends on who the victim of the joke is. In fact, Louis CK did exactly that in his SNL monologue earlier this season. If you make the perpetrator the victim of the joke, you can do it.
Sure, you can tell jokes about those things — it just depends on who the victim of the joke is. In fact, Louis CK did exactly that in his SNL monologue earlier this season. If you make the perpetrator the victim of the joke, you can do it.
I agree with all of this. But I thought the SNL joke in question picked the wrong target, and not the equivalent of the perpetrator.
Next thing you’re going to be telling me it’s offensive to have a Holocaust-themed ice skating routine…
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/27/europe/russian-ice-skating-holocaust-trnd/index.html
Jost NAILED it (and I lean left). The wild, hysterical overreactions just reinforce that fact.
I don’t see how the reactions reinforce anything, nor do I think the piece I linked was wild or hysterical. If you don’t think the joke was insensitive, okay. It’s a subjective question. But belittling the reactions of those who did doesn’t really answer any questions here.
“I agree with all of this. But I thought the SNL joke in question picked the wrong target, and not the equivalent of the perpetrator.”
Tinder was the target.
Re: The EM Drive
The paper doesn’t do a lot to convince me that what they measured isn’t just some kind of “noise” in the data or something incorrect entirely. The minuscule amount of “thrust” they detected isn’t enough proof (to me) to upend a fundamental law of physics, and the relatively large margin of error they relate in the data doesn’t do much to strengthen their case. It basically has to be a perpetual motion machine to work.
That said, like all things science, test the hell out of it, and if it turns out to be correct, let’s rock.