Two Insider posts this week from Arizona, one on Padres and Dodgers prospects and one on Dodgers, Reds, and Rangers prospects. I’ll have one more post coming from this trip. I did not chat this week because I was out at games every day. The trip also meant I didn’t get to review a boardgame this week either.
You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. The book now has two positive reviews out, one from Kirkus Reviews and one from Publishers Weekly.
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And now, the links…
- The best longread of the week comes from Patrick Hruby of Vice, on Wisconsin forward Nigel Hayes and his lawsuit against the NCAA, challenging the college cartel’s rules on amateurism.
- Also great, although with some caveats: what is the fate of the critic in the “clickbait” age? There’s an underlying argument here about quality of content versus that clickbait mentality, but I think the author lapses into cultural elitism enough to undermine his point.
- The world’s only grass-eating monkeys survive in one protected savannah in Ethiopia, but their habitat is under threat from humans and climate change. The photography in this National Geographic piece is stunning.
- Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, who belongs to a crackpot evangelical medical association called AAPS, said that states should decide on mandatory vaccination laws, and the Washington Post showed why this is a terrible idea, in graphical form. They also wrote about the AAPS’ “unorthodox” (read: bullshit) positions on science a month ago. It is absolutely insane that someone so virulently anti-science is running HHS.
- An algal bloom in the Gulf of Oman is growing thanks to climate change, which our Clueless Leader says doesn’t exist and/or is a Chinese hoax.
- Trump fired US Attorney Preet Bharara earlier this month, perhaps because Bharara was investigating Secretary Price’s stock trades for evidence of insider trading. The move may also benefit Friend of Trump Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News was facing multiple investigations from Bharara’s office.
- If you live in Georgia’s sixth district, formerly represented by Price, and are as outraged as I am over the anti-science, anti-civil liberties policies of the current administration, consider supporting Jon Ossoff in the upcoming special election on April 18th.
- Congress is threatening to pass a national right-to-work law, which would deal the most serious blow to American unions since the Wagner Act guaranteed workers’ basic rights to organize. There is a legitimate debate to be had on unionization; closed shops can artificially restrict employment, and unionized labor forces can increase prices for consumers, to pick two issues that arise in industries with strong unions. Right-to-work laws circumvent the debate entirely, and serve no purpose but to help enrich employers.
- Meanwhile, in Australia, the Rational United States, the Prime Minister has proposed banning unvaccinated children from childcare facilities.
- The gluten-free fad may be a symptom of a bigger problem of patients forum-shopping and falling for quacks, like “naturopaths” or “allopathic” practitioners who con patients into submitting to expensive tests for conditions that can only be cured by those charlatans’ treatments.
- Gwyneth Paltrow, who has become an expert of pseudoscience and woo, proposed a “goat milk therapy” for parasites that is both stupid and dangerous. Paltrow appears to have the biology knowledge of very small rocks, but that hasn’t stopped her from recommending all kinds of fake “treatments.”
- The rise of Elijah Quashie, an amateur food critic in the UK known as the Chicken Connoisseur, led to this Eater piece asking who gets to be a food critic? Is it true, as Quashie said in this interview, that once you start being a critic, then you’re a critic, with no further credentials required? If not, then is criticism of food, art, fashion, etc., inherently elitist, available only to those who can afford the proper background or training?
- A basketball player in Maryland was prevented from playing in the team’s first regional final game because she was wearing a hijab. The error was the referees’, not the district or state authorities.
- The Guardian did an update and profile of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP chapter head who was posing as a black woman until she was outed by her parents as white. The piece includes an excerpt from her upcoming memoir. I might have found a shred of sympathy for her after reading this, although I still think posing as a person of color and then comparing herself to transgender people was inexcusable.
- Reader Stephanie K. passed along this Modern Farmer link from last June on how cold-pressed juice is bad for you and for the environment. Pro tip: eat whole fruit, rather than just drinking juice.
- Reader Larry passed along this link from Vice on how lax regulations allow shady used-car dealers to sell cars they don’t own, which in turn become legal nightmares for the buyers.
- I’d mentioned a few weeks ago that Kurt Eichenwald had gone after trolls who’d sent him images with the goal of triggering his epilepsy. One of them was just charged with cyberstalking in Texas.
- Remember Srebrenica? The Bosnian town just elected a Serb mayor, reigniting long-simmering ethnic tensions in the village and in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole, where the three main ethnic groups are threatening to divide the country into yet smaller states along religious and linguistic lines.
- Another reader recommendation (I apologize, I can’t find your tweet): Ars Technica explores some of the boardgames the CIA uses to train officers. I don’t think I’ll be reviewing Collection or Kingpin any time soon.
thanks to those links, i’m too depressed to go to sleep.
Let me start off by saying that I fully support laws requiring vaccinations with exceptions to those requiring them for medical reasons (e.g., compromised immune systems).
But the question I always return to when discussing these laws is how do we enforce them. I’ve worked in a variety of schools and child care settings, in addition to sending my own children to multiple ones. How would a school enforce this? What do you do if a parent who refuses to vaccinate their child shows up and refuses to leave? What if the child arrives on a school bus? What if the kid comes in waving a doctor’s note that you suspect is forged or signed by some anti-vax quack?
I imagine that passing these laws — even if enforcement is difficult — would provide legal options to anyone made sick by a child without vaccinations; being in violation of the law would certainly seem to make the parents civilly (and perhaps criminally) liable.
But that doesn’t present those kids from getting sick in the first place. So how do we enforce it? If a parent shows up with their unvaccinated child, does the school call the police, have them arrest the parent, have the proper authorities takes legal custody of the child, administer the vaccines, and maintain this arrangement or repeat it every time another dose is scheduled? That seems like it could be traumatizing to a child. And while the culpability for that trauma ultimately lies with the parents, it still does not seem like the route we want to go.
Maybe there is something I’m missing and, again, this is in no way an argument against the laws or what they attempt to accomplish. Just an acknowledgment of the on-the-ground difficulties of enforcement. Any thoughts on how to do so?
I want to expand a bit more on the issue of forged paperwork:
Public schools and most larger private schools or daycare providers (especially corporate ones) could reasonably be expected to have a person or group of people charged with verifying the paperwork. But smaller cites — especially homecare based settings that might only have one or two employees — how would they do it? I worked for a small-ish daycare (9 total employees… though as an arm of a university we certainly could have leveraged resources there) and was charged with entering such information into our database. Some folks used a form that we provided, having the doctor check the appropriate boxes before signing and returning. Others used the office’s forms. I entered whatever each form said into the computer but honestly had no idea if the information was accurate. How could I? Even if I called the number, would you put it beyond these whackos to have someone ready to answer the call and pretend to be the doctor’s office? Should I have visited each office personally to verify that they were real AND that all the information was correct?
We’re essentially taking parents at their word on these issues which means we’re highly susceptible to being lied to.
Hi Keith- asking if you could edit the section on Price to briefly mention what his AAPS stands for? There’s a legitimate AAPS (American Association of Pharmaceutical Sciences) that believes in peer reviewed research and sounds like the antithesis of the Price group, and wouldn’t want the two being confused. Thanks!
Price’s position on the federal government mandating vaccines is correct as a matter of constitutional law – the federal government does not have “policy power” (i.e., virtually unfettered power to regulate health, safety, and morals). States do, which is why it’s up to them to require vaccinations (which he said he supports)
I’m usually the biggest defender of federalism, but I think the federal government should step in on things like vaccinations and the environment when the decisions of one state can harm the citizens of another. I agree though that’s it’s not entirely fair to pile on Price here as vaccinations have always (as far as I know) been a state issue and he does in fact support them.
My issue with price on this topic is that the crackpot group of which he’s a member doesn’t support mandatory vaccinations.
Well, there’s a 2014 report from the Congressional Research Service that suggests otherwise (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS21414.pdf). In the Executive Summary, it states “The Secretary of Health and Human Services has authority under the Public Health Service Act to issue regulations necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the states or from state to state.” It does go on to say that (as of 2014) there were no federal laws mandating vaccination, but the power exists should someone who, you know, actually believes in science is the head of HHS.
Jim, that’s not the same as power to mandate universal vaccination; there must be some tie-in to interstate commerce. The rationale that a child may at some point travel to another state would most likely be too disparate to justify a ban. But the federal government also (probably) could not say that a person may not travel to another state without a vaccine, as that would violate the constitutionally protected right to travel.
To the person below who pointed out the typo of “policy power” rather than “police power,” you can blame that on autocorrect and not paying attention to my phone before I clicked “post.”
The ultimate irony for Hayes was there for everyone to see yesterday. He made his school millions of dollars with his winning shot, and made himself nothing except a memory.
On the question of criticism (perhaps some disclosure – I have a PhD in a cultural field), I am of two minds. On the one hand, many educated critics are trained in specific critical methods, methods that are akin to the scientific method in that they are agreed upon by experts in the field and considered essential by those same experts to learned discourse in that field. On the other hand, the issue of wealth and barriers to entry is real, and most cultural fields would be improved if more people were able to access them. And, I would probably allow that art criticism (for example) is not as high-stakes as science (though there’s lots of big money there), and that safeguarding science, medicine, and journalism is more important for society than deciding which burger restaurant is worth going to.
But still, I worry about our general societal disregard for educated expertise. And cultural critics are experts, too.
“Price’s position on the federal government mandating vaccines is correct as a matter of constitutional law – the federal government does not have “policy power””
Thats certainly one opinion.
Keith, thank you so much for the long read on Nigel Hayes. As a Wisconsin Alum, and a non-basketball fan, about the only time I watch college hoops is Wisconsin Games in the tourney. My wife loves football and baseball, but can’t really stand basketball. Nevertheless, she was on the couch with me watching Wisconsin beat Nova, while nursing our child. She saw the layup Hayes made at the end of the game and said “That was a beautiful play,” because, while she doesn’t like basketball, she knows athletics. Today, I was telling her about the column and she says “Great basketball player, smart, and good. Not often those things are all linked.”
Pretty sure he meant police power.
Not mentioned in the links, so I’ll mention it here–the President’s budget as proposed would be devastating to scientific research (link to one commentary, there are many others). Research funding has traditional enjoyed bipartisan support, so if this issue is important to you, please call your state representatives. Doubly so, for those with GOP representatives. I believe it is not being hyperbolic to state that the proposed cuts would result in a lost generation of scientists. As a a biologist at Flyover U who relies on NSF funding to perform basic research and train undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs, this absolutely means that my lab’s doors are at risk of closing.