The 2018 MLB Rule 4 draft has come and gone and I have recaps up for all National League teams and all American League teams. I also wrote my reactions to day one on Monday night, and held a Klawchat on Tuesday after the fourth round, while teams continued drafting.
You can find more details on my top 100 prospects for the draft on my Big Board, and can see my final first-round mock from Monday afternoon, which had 9 picks on the dot and flipped Arizona’s first two picks.
Over at Paste, I recapped what I saw at Paradox Interactive’s PDXCON in Stockholm last month, where they announced tabletop versions of four of their popular video game titles: Crusader Kings, Cities Skylines, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron.
My free email newsletter is back and I hope it’ll be more or less weekly again now that the draft is over; I’m planning to send the next issue this afternoon or tomorrow morning.
Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I will be at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, on July 14th, joined by my friend Jay Jaffe (The Cooperstown Casebook), and hope to announce a signing in the Boston area for the weekend of July 28th shortly.
And now, the links…
- Kat Kinsman had the best piece I read on his suicide & what it means for the industry and society overall. (I’m sure there were many great pieces I didn’t read, too.)
- Bourdain’s 1999 piece for the New Yorker on the dirty secrets of restaurant kitchens is what launched his career as a writer and eventually a celebrity (ex-)chef.
- WIRED gives us a hybrid profile/book review around former DNI James Clapper, who just wrote a memoir that is highly critical of the current Administration and the societal trends that enabled it.
- As a lifelong fan of the Muppets, I greatly enjoyed Slate’s group interview with several Muppeteers and execs as well as a TV critic and even a therapist who offers insights on the Kermit/Miss Piggy relationship.
- The California judge who sentenced Stanford rapist Brock Turner to just six months in jail – reduced to three months for good behavior – has been recalled by voters, the first judge to be recalled in that state in 86 years. Julia Ioffe wrote a long piece for the Huffington Post on how Stanford law professor Michelle Dauber led the recall effort, citing the judge’s history of considering the needs of the rapists and abusers in his court over the impact of their crimes. Dauber also identifies Stanford as “one of the most unfriendly, if not the most unfriendly school to victims of sexual assault.”
- Alia Shawkat (Maeby on Arrested Development) spoke to Vanity Fair about her disappointment in her co-stars’ comments in a recent New York Times interview that broached Jeffrey Tambor’s inappropriate behavior on set.
- South Dakota Rep. Michael Clark said businesses should be able to turn away customers of color if they want. He later apologized and admitted the comment was racist, although Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. compared the moment to a hood being removed.”
- Florida gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam likes to brag about being an “NRA Sellout.” While he was Commissioner of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, his office stopped running background checks for concealed carry permits for nearly a year … because an employee couldn’t log on to the national database to run the checks. Thirty-odd other states, including Delaware, honor these permits under reciprocal agreements.
- Florida is also one of the states that denies voting rights to convicted felons, and Governor Rick Scott, also a Republican, has made it even harder than ever for those citizens to regain that Constitutional right, often dismissing petitioners’ applications in mere minutes.
- Thousands of Poles demonstrated against mandatory vaccination laws. A measles outbreak in Romania has already killed dozens of children, with 200 new cases a week. Some cretin named Kat Von D announced to the world she won’t vaccinate her as yet unborn child. We all deserve to die in a plague for creating this world.
- Jess McHugh wrote about the societal expectation that women should smile, which is both very American and relatively new.
- Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach rode in a local parade with a replica .50 caliber gun in the car alongside him. It didn’t go over well.
- You’ve probably seen coverage of the increased numbers of scientists running for political office this year; the Washington Post documents a new wave of teachers doing the same, and they’re not all running as Democrats (as just about all scientists are).
- The Guardian interviewed first-time author Elaine Castillo about her debut novel America is Not the Heart and issues of race and cultural appropriation.
- The UN’s human rights investigator on extreme poverty has found that America’s poor are becoming even worse off under Trump. I’d like to see what portion of that underclass voted for Trump and/or other Republicans in 2016.
- The Harvard Business Review offers some brief tips on how to be a more productive learner.
- This NPR piece on raising better eaters by skipping the kids’ menu is generally good advice, even acknowledging that cost and time become factors in what we feed our kids. My daughter is an adventurous eater with a broad palate. When servers in restaurants compliment me on her taste, I tell them I can only take so much credit; I introduced her to lots of foods, but she was willing to try everything.
- A rare bit of positive news in the fight against climate change: the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere has plummeted. Now we just need to devote more public funds to the effort.
- Doctor/scientist Edzard Ernst writes about realizing that homeopathy isn’t just useless, but actively harmful in the way it misleads patients and can steer them away from effective medical treatment. It’s not just that homeopathy has failed every test of whether it works, but it isn’t chemically possible for it to work.
- Board game news: Game Salute’s new Kickstarter for A War of Whispers is nearing its $30,000 goal.
- Asmodee Digital announced it’s going to bring some of its board game titles to Nintendo Switch.
- Acram Digital released a new 30-second trailer for the Istanbul app, due by the end of the month for iOS and Android.
“We all deserve to die in a plague for creating this world.”
I can’t help but feel that way on a pretty regular basis anymore. And I have 3, soon to be 4, nieces/nephews that I’d like to see have wonderful lives. But I fear they’ll never get the chance.
Speaking of the Muppets, what did you think of the trailer to The Happytime Murders, even though it’s not quite the Muppets?
““We all deserve to die in a plague for creating this world.”
I can’t help but feel that way on a pretty regular basis anymore. And I have 3, soon to be 4, nieces/nephews that I’d like to see have wonderful lives. But I fear they’ll never get the chance.”
I have a three year old daughter and a 1 year old son. I regularly contemplate just running to the mountains to be in a peaceful place as the world dies.
It’s a pedantic point, but voting isn’t really a Constitutional right. A few amendments prohibit voting discrimination, but there is no affirmative right to vote in the Constitution (and certainly there isn’t for ex-felons).
Yes it is – unless you are also arguing that freedom of speech is not a constitutional right either.
If voting is a constitutional right, then it’s an un-enumerated right under the 9th Amendment. Michael is right, there is no specific guarantee of people being allowed to vote, it just says that you can’t deny people the ability based on certain characteristics/traits. Regarding ex-felons, that article makes a very good point, in that the 15th Amendment says you can’t base a denial of voting rights based on “previous” servitude. The question really becomes, when does that condition change from present to past? Is it when you are released from jail? When you get off probation or parole? What if you received a suspended sentence, or are released early due to overcrowding? It’s a much more complicated question than it appears on the face, because ex-felons should absolutely be allowed to vote, but when do they become an ex-felon versus just a felon?
The 1st Amendment applies to everyone. The amendments that mention voting rights only list people that cannot be denied the right to vote if that right is granted to people of other sexes, races, and ages. If a state wanted to limit its voting to all people who made over $1 million a year, that would likely be federally constitutional (or it should be, unless I’m missing something obvious). Bad policy, but likely constitutional.
You’re citing to one man’s opinion, an opinion that takes a very, very expansive (and likely incorrect) view. He says that voting rights take a back seat to freedom of speech, assembly, etc. There’s a reason for that: those rights are enshrined in the Constitution. The Supreme Court even said in Bush v. Gore that “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.”
Jeremy, the 14th Amendment, Section 2 specifically says that voting rights can be abridged “for participation in rebellion, or other crime.” I think the 15th Amendment’s “previous servitude” language quite clearly only applies to former slaves, although some may take a broader interpretation than that.
The author of the Atlantic article even admitted in 2006 there was no right to vote. https://www.salon.com/2006/09/21/no_right_to_vote/
And Politifact investigated in 2013: http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2013/may/30/mark-pocan/us-constitution-not-explicit-right-vote-wisconsin-/
“nothing in the Constitution explicitly guarantees our right to vote”
That’s accurate, and also very narrowly worded.
Which makes it much different from freedom of speech. I admitted at the beginning that I was nitpicking, but I wouldn’t call voting a constitutional right. It can, in theory, be restricted for many, many people, unlike other rights explicitly mentioned. My guess would be most Americans don’t know that.
You can’t–and you shouldn’t–run. You exert your influence in every sphere in which you have influence, so that the next generations WILL have a chance at a chance.
Be optimistic for their sake. This is an epochal time, perhaps…though it will be compressed and accelerated by the comm tech that mindlessly mandates our lives. Read, think and resist.
Count me among the group of people who think the world would be a little bit better if *everyone* smiled more often.
That’s fine as a perspective, but problematic if one is asking strangers to smile. At best it’s condescending, and at worst it’s sexist (if one is only asking women).
Everything about the state of Florida never logging into the NCIS database for over a year screams incompetence, or worse, from the top. From the article, there were only two people who had the access; someone who recently moved to a different position but kept responsibilities from their old position (and were terminated) and another who had zero training. Both worked in the mailroom, which makes zero sense for putting in charge of accessing an external database. Why wasn’t IT involved to bring in some alerting and monitoring, both with regards to the state having access to the database and checking the volume of calls to make sure it is being done an expected number of times?
They never had status reports sent to upper management on a weekly or monthly basis? How did they immediately know that there were 365 applications for a concealed weapons permit that should be re-done? What about the other 200,000+ applications, were they ever re-done?
The Muppets article/interview is delightful. Thanks for sharing it.