Trade writeups for Insiders:
• Jeurys Familia to Oakland
• Zach Britton to the Yankees
• J.A. Happ to the Yankees
• The Eovaldi, Andriese, and Oh trades
• Cole Hamels to the Cubs
I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
On the board game front, I reviewed Istanbul: The Dice Game for Paste this week; it’s fun, and quick to learn and play, but not as good as the original Istanbul.
At 1 pm today (Saturday) I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, talking Smart Baseball and signing books. I hope to see many of you there – and some more of you at Gen Con in Indianapolis next week as well, where I have a signing scheduled on Friday at noon and am happy to sign books any other time during the con.
I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more often lately; you can sign up through that link and see archives of past editions.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Texas Monthly investigates how a waterpark owner from Texas built a waterslide that decapitated a Kansas boy in 2016 at the park’s Kansas City location. The boy’s death opened a window on the virtually unregulated industry of amusement parks.
- Arizona is headed for chronic water shortages, according to this New York Times piece. I was hardly alone in seeing this coming; I wrote in 2013 that the state government’s climate change denialism, including total denial that water was a scarce resource, was a reason I didn’t want to own a house there and thus have a substantial portion of my material wealth tied up in an asset that might lose value very quickly when the water ran out.
- Alt-right troll “Weird Mike” Cernovich, once arrested for rape and a frequent rape apologist, has moved from pushing Pizzagate to targeting liberals he doesn’t like by digging up old tweets and trying to get them fired from their jobs or entertainment projects. He took down James Gunn – whose tweets in question were, in my opinion, beyond inappropriate – and has targeted journalists who’ve dared write about his antics. Cernovich, who appears to enjoy the protection of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and fellow Pizzagate-bullshit promoter Jack Posobiec don’t like when people dare question or criticize them, doxing, harassing, and threatening their antagonists with the help of anonymous followers.
- Will Leitch writes that baseball’s “steroid panic” appears to be finally be over, although I’ll believe that in full when Barry Bonds gets into Cooperstown.
- My Paste editor Garrett Martin points out how giving in to these trolls encourages them to do it more, as now they’re targeting various comedians whose tweets are often offensive by design (in the service of humor) and fare poorly when taken out of context.
- Digital devices are threatening to impact the climate more than the aviation industry, as more things are connected to the Internet and thus require more power, while public utilities continue to push back on renewable energy sources (and presumably some consumers won’t or can’t pay more for it).
- A few veterans spoke to WBUR about the sports world’s fetishization of the military; Nick Francona, recently fired by the Mets, is quoted at length.
- Conservatives who decry ‘outrage culture’ are outraged by a (rather boring) piece of art. I mean, there are some seriously full diapers over this one. It’s not even particularly good art, or that meaningful, but it is clearly protected speech.
- Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold died this week at age 57 of pancreatic cancer. A reader pointed me to two seminal pieces from Gold: his 1998 story “The Year I Ate Pico Boulevard” and his 1989 profile of rising gangsta rap act N.W.A..
- Food writer Camas Davis learned how to butcher meat and wrote a book about it; she discussed what she learned and how it affects what she cooks and eats with NPR’s Terry Gross.
- Bloomberg reports that workers’ wages have fallen since the Trump ‘tax cut’, which didn’t exactly cut taxes for everyone so maybe don’t call it that.
- There’s a lot of talk about “socialized medicine” and “socialism” right now, often from people who don’t know what the terms mean but instead care about what they stand for. Socialized medicine is a buzzword; the goal is – or at least should be – to provide health care for all citizens, because it’s a human right, and because a healthier populace is more productive and puts less strain on public resources, thus growing the economy and making the country better off as a whole. Israel got this and reformed its health care system starting in 1995. Their results put them well ahead of the United States on many measures, including the percentage of GDP spent on health care.
- Georgia Representative Jason Spencer – guess which party – went on Sasha Baron Cohen’s new gotcha show, and bared his ass while shouting the n-word on camera. He announced his plans to resign on Thursday.
- Deadspin’s Albert Burnenko weighs in on Tronc’s evisceration of the Daily News to further profit its shareholders.
- A candidate for Missouri’s state legislature – guess which party – is raffling off a 3-D printer that can make ‘untraceable’ guns. Of course, whether he ever gives away such a machine is immaterial: he’s already gotten a ton of free publicity for this stunt.
- A climate-change denying Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate – guess which party – was asked about climate change by a voter, and his response was to belittle her for her youth. Scott Wagner has previously said that he thinks climate change is caused by … body heat.
- Meanwhile, a Harvard climate scientist who has a geoengineering idea to try to spray particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun’s heat discussed fighting misinformation and ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy theorists online and in the real world.
- The federal government is halting reviews of pesticides that may threaten endangered species as a sop to the pesticides’ manufacturers; wild salmon are particularly at risk from the pesticides known as organophosphates.
- Pursuant to my comment above about “socialism” and “socialized medicine:”
a separate point – worth exploring – but most of what is now branded 'democratic socialism' in the USA in 2018 is more or less the Truman presidential platform in 1948. so there are some definitional issues we probably need to work through.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 26, 2018
Hey KLaw, thanks for posting the article about Wagner that I posted in the comments for last week’s STB (or a similar article, at least). I’m a PA resident, and I think Tom Wolf will beat Wagner, but this state did flip for Trump two years ago, so electing a guy who proudly decries science the way he did is absolutely terrifying to me. Thanks for helping to spread the word.
I (a Georgia resident, albeit in a more enlightened district) am in no way making excuses for Jason Spencer, who, if he can’t tell when he’s so obviously being played, is blatantly unfit for any governing role without even taking into account his abhorrent views and behavior. But his admission of paranoia coupled with his outspoken sponsorship of bills that provide additional recourse to adult survivors of child abuse may hint at some personal demons that would inform his state of mind and resulting view of the world. Prior to this episode I had thought I might find him pitiable in his weird performative anger, had he not ascended to a position of influence and thus became a real danger to society. I would even say it’s possible some good may come of this, if he were to engage in some honest self-examination and share what he finds.
Gosh, that Kansas art museum contretemps really has it all, doesn’t it? Performative flag humping, willful misunderstanding of (admittedly pretty dumb) art, and a belief in “free speech” only when that speech is being exercised by white conservatives.
“power, while public utilities continue to push back on renewable energy sources (and presumably some consumers won’t or can’t pay more for it).”
Prior to this stupid, fascist administration we have, and the political party who has decided that power is more important than the people they are supposed to represent enabling it, solar was becoming cheaper than fossil fuels.
You may know a lot more than I do about this – was that true without federal subsidies? Those subsidies are worthwhile, as reducing climate change and dependence on foreign oil (or fracking) are public goods, but I wasn’t sure.
I believe so. I don’t have links handy, but the last I saw, the cost to produce solar was lower than the cost for fossil fuels (which are of course also heavily subsidized).