My ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up for Insiders. I held a Klawchat on Friday.
Over at Vulture, my ranking of the 25 best mobile board game apps went up last week.
Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in DC on July 14th and am shooting for an event in the Boston suburbs on July 28th. Throw a comment below if you think you could make the latter event.
And now, the links…
- Longreads: the New Yorker looks at corrupt Chicago cop Ronald Watts, whose reign of terror in the city’s projects was ended by an FBI investigation and helped by a woman herself wrongfully charged with drug possession. Thirty-two convictions have already been vacated because of Watts’ own crimes, but he was involved in something like 500 in total.
- The Guardian goes long on how a small group of dissidents ended the 23-year reign of Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh last year. The BBC’s Inquiry podcast from last week covered similar ground, asking why some revolutions succeed, starting with the recent peaceful regime change in Armenia.
- 60 Minutes investigates how the media fell for the story peddled by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who talked a good game about her company’s medical products that never worked. She defrauded investors and put patients at risk, but hasn’t even been charged with a crime. You’ll get more jail time for a second arrest for marijuana possession (the federal mandatory minimum is 15 days) than Holmes did for a nearly billion-dollar fraud.
- The New York Times‘ Sopan Deb sat down with the cast of Arrested Development for an interview with some very unsatisfying answers on Jeffrey Tambor’s on-set behavior. The men seem to be handwaving away whatever happened, while Jessica Walter (his victim here) and Alia Shawkat, the only women in the room, are outnumbered while standing up for themselves.
- This SABR article by Pete Palmer is from 2017, but just crossed my timeline this week: Palmer looks at how big luck/randomness can be in individual year-to-year stats. One big takeaway is that for NOPS (similar to OPS+), “five percent of the players can change 40 or more points from year to year due to luck alone.”
- Basketball writer Bo Churney took his own life at age 31 last week. His brother set up a fundraising page to benefit at-risk LGBTQ youth in Atlanta in Churney’s memory, and it has already passed $20,000 in just a few days.
- A 30-year-old manchild living with his parents fought them in court over their demand that he move out, claiming he was entitled to six months’ notice of eviction. He lost, but of course he’s now some sort of folk hero, appearing on InfoWars on Friday.
- A (now former) doctor spiked his girlfriend’s tea with an abortifacient and was sentenced to three years in prison after she asked the judge for leniency in his case.
- Harley-Davidson took its tax cut from the Republican-led tax bill, closed a manufacturing facility in Kansas City, then bought back $700 million in stock.
- Arizona’s Secretary of Education, a dingbat creationist, wants to weaken or delete references to evolution in state educational standards.
- Who on earth told Jameela Jamil, who plays Tehani on NBC’s The Good Place, that she was “too ethnic” for Hollywood? She also discusses #MeToo in the embedded video interview. I’m halfway through Season 2 of The Good Place, which really hit its stride near the end of season one after a sluggish start.
- Deadspin’s Tim Burke points out, yet again, that the claim that ESPN is losing subscribers over ‘politics’ is bogus.
- From The Onion: ‘The Onion’ Has Finally Read Michael Cohen’s 2013 Email Regarding His Client Donald Trump And Would Like To Discuss The Matter Further At His Convenience.
- The BBC revealed that Cohen received $400K from Ukraine’s government to arrange talks with President Trump.
- An Associated Press investigation found that Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy used his connections to enrich himself by trying to shift U.S. policy in the Middle East against Qatar.
- Center-right Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin excoriates Devin Nunes for burning a source to save the President’s skin. Lawfareblog’s Benjamin Wittes writes on the same subject that Trump has ‘all the power’ through his unfettered interference with the FBI and DoJ.
- The Kentucky congressional candidate who was told, when she was 13, by her congressperson that she could never be a fighter pilot beat the moderate candidate in the Democratic primary despite national party support for the latter candidate.
- You’ve probably seen the story that the feds have lost track of nearly 1500 migrant children forcibly separated from their parents. The collective non-response by our politicians is reminiscent of the pattern in pre-WWI Germany described by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.
- Two Montana residents detained by a Border Patrol agent for speaking Spanish are now talking to the ACLU about legal options.
- Sweden distributed a ‘prepare for war’ leaflet to homes in anticipation of a cyber or terror attack.
- There’s an Ebola outbreak in sub-Saharan Africa again, and while the new vaccine will help, it won’t stop the epidemic without changes in behavior.
- Maine is dealing with increasing vaccination refusals from stupid parents. The answer is simple – change the law to eliminate nonmedical exemptions, especially the “philosophical exemption,” which amounts to “I’m an idiot and don’t like vaccines.” Get on it, Mainers.
- There’s a new Kickstarter for a co-op zombie survival board game, Z First Impact, just out from WYSIWYGames.
Did the Arrested Development interview sound like children trying to hide their parents’ fighting to the outside world? To me it really read like “If we act like it’s not a big deal, then people will stop talking about it, and then mom and dad won’t be thinking about it and they’ll be happy again!”
That’s not to excuse anyone minimizing the harm, but it really didn’t sound like folks were trying to protect Tambor, they just didn’t want their little world to be undisturbed. I get the instinct (“If we act like it’s not a big deal then it’s not a big deal”) so I find it hard to think the other men were intentionally enabling abuse. It’s guys like that that you need to remind that them acting like it’s not big deal because it’s easier for them 1) makes women like Jessica Walter feel abandoned and 2) lets guys like Tambor do it again because there are no consequences.
That’s exactly why the problem hasn’t been resolved before, everyone’s been too worried about keeping the money rolling in to do the right thing.
“You’ve probably seen the story that the feds have lost track of nearly 1500 migrant children forcibly separated from their parents. The collective non-response by our politicians is reminiscent of the pattern in pre-WWI Germany described by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
. There are so many substantive parallels to the late 1920s and early 1930’s germany. This one is… HIGHLY alarming. This is how ethnic cleansing and/or genocide starts.
I’d be interested in the Boston event
Anyone who thought most companies would do anything BUT huge stock buybacks and dividend payouts after getting their tax cuts was pretty stupid. CNN had an article saying there’s been nearly $180 billion in buybacks since the tax cut, the most ever. The last time nearly that much was spent on buybacks was……just prior to the start of the Great Recession. Is it sad to think that only another such event might be the only thing to get Trump and other Republicans out of office?
Here’s the story I referenced:
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/20/investing/stocks-week-ahead-buybacks-tax-cuts/index.html
@Pat D
Stock buybacks don’t mean much. Money doesn’t disappear when a company buys back its stock. The stockholders have it now. They can spend it (not bad for the economy), or invest it in other companies that use the money to expand. The fact that a bunch of companies don’t need the cash right now doesn’t mean others don’t.
That said, the tax bill is bad on other grounds.
So you insist that stock buybacks are meaningless, but then you have to ask why they’re bad?
O……K.
Yes. Turns out some people know things I don’t. I happen to think he’s missing something and not me, but both are possible. As long as we disagree, we should keep talking. You don’t have to worry about that, though; sounds like you already know everything.
The 30 year old manchild rejected being called a millennial because he is “very conservative”. I imagine his buddies at 8chan didn’t realize he was one of their own, and he will be their idol after Jones gave him $3,000 so he can move out.
The stock buybacks are bad. They shift wealth upward, and slow the velocity of dollars.
@Paul
How? (Sincerely asking.)
Stock buybacks are of stocks that are primarily held by people investing a little bit in the market, and bought by by major ownership of the company… in other words, the control of the company is being held more tightly by a smaller number of people
But doesn’t the announcement of a buyback create a seller’s market, to the benefit of said small investor? And isn’t the small investor MORE likely to spend cash proceeds from the sale than a larger investor would be?
People aren’t selling the stock against their will though. The stock companies buy back is coming from a willing seller.
I’m not saying that buybacks are the best use of the tax savings, but I don’t think they are “bad” in and of themselves, at least in the context of creating shareholder return, which is a primary responsibility of public companies.
Again, it’s more to do with the promises and assertions that are made when they pass these tax cuts. They always say how it will spur job hiring, investment and wage increases, and that typically never happens. So far with these tax cuts, there’s little to no evidence of any such things occurring as a result.
But the corporations will enjoy those massive permanent tax cuts while yours and mine will expire in a few years.
Sometimes, Facebook brings interesting articles to me and I think this is one. It’s about Dagen H in Sweden, the day in 1967 that Sweden switched from driving on the left side of the road (despite having mostly cars where drivers were on the left side) to the right side. The rest of continental Europe was driving on the right side of the road. It required lots of planning, including a huge media campaign by the government to inform everyone about it, and changing all road signs around the country in one night.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180417-a-thrilling-mission-to-get-the-swedish-to-change-overnight
Keith, I would definitely come to the Boston surburbs event. Hope you can make it happen!
I would go to a Boston area event.
So would I