My top 40 free agents ranking is filed, and will run two days after the end of the World Series, so that could be as soon as Tuesday and no later than Friday. I did hold a Klawchttps://klaw.me/3ogZKgthat on Thursday.
My latest review for Paste covers the legacy game My City, from the prolific designer Reiner Knizia (Samurai, Lost Cities, Tigris & Euphrates), a fun tile-laying game that ramps up the legacy rules slowly enough to keep the game accessible.
My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was longtime A’s beat writer Susan Slusser, talking about Billy Beane’s future, the free agency of Liam Hendriks and Marcus Semien, and the playoffs to that point. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.
I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter earlier this week to subscribers. Thank you all for the kind feedback, as always.
As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Verge has the story of how a deal with Taiwanese company Foxconn, touted by Trump and former Gov. Scott Walker, to generate jobs for Wisconsin workers went completely south and will probably not lead to any new jobs or economic development.
- Remember that story a year or two ago about how U.S. agents abroad might have been attacked with some sort of sonic weapon? Julia Ioffe’s piece in GQ looks at the increasing number of cases, evidence that Russia is behind it, and the CIA’s reluctance to investigate.
- The New Yorker tells how Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin, has spent his year in the Cabinet working to undermine labor protections. The President of the AFL-CIO even sent Scalia a letter in April accusing the Secretary of forsaking the very mission of the department, which was created in 1913 to defend the rights of workers, job seekers, and retirees, not the employers Scalia seeks to protect.
- Prevagen is a nutritional supplement – that should set off alarm bells right there – that claims it can improve your memory. The FDA has been receiving consumer complaints and notices of adverse events for over a decade, but lax regulations over the supplement market have helped the manufacturer avoid serious consequences.
- Two devastating stories on the decline of local newspapers and how it may harm the towns those papers served: As local news dies out, Republican PR firms are cooking up pay-to-play faux-newspapers that look like the real thing. Meanwhile, a Floyd, Virginia, newspaper fired its only employee, leaving the paper reliant on freelance content and articles from sister publications.
- Will Leitch wrote about the lessons from how baseball held its season during the pandemic, navigating early interruptions to the point where we’re about to finish the World Series.
- James Wagner wrote about the WhatsApp group for women in baseball that has served as an informal support network, spearheaded by Cleveland’s life skills coordinator Jen Wolf. I’ve known Jen a long time and I am not the least bit surprised that she would be behind something like this.
- Stop wiping down your groceries and focus on things that actually reduce the chances of transmission, like washing your hands.
- Sinclair Broadcasting aired an interview with a white nationalist last weekend, conducted by anti-vaxxer Sharyl Atkisson.
- The editorial board of the Washington Post wrote that the Trump administration kidnapped children, and we shouldn’t mince words about it.
- The Atlantic‘s editorial board unequivocally endorsed Joe Biden, imploring readers to vote out Donald Trump.
- Amy Coney Barrett overturned a civil court ruling in favor of a woman raped by a prison guard in Wisconsin “because the sexual assaults fell outside of the guard’s official duties,” and the watchdog group Accountable.US said such “unconscionable cruelty” has no place on the high court.
- A professor who worked at Notre Dame says her experience as a working mother there was very different from Barrett’s. The Catholic university’s “pro-life” policies don’t extend to reasonable resources or time off for pregnant women or working mothers.
- Dr. Craig Spencer was vilified by Trump in 2014 when the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia-Presbyterian came home from working with Ebola patients in Guinea with the virus. He hit back at Trump this month over the President’s irresponsible behavior while infected with COVID-19, and called Trump’s lack of empathy “the single greatest threat to the American people.”
- Scientific American debunks the myth that COVID-19 death counts are inflated.
- The BBC has a useful primer on Bolivia’s presidential election.
- BuzzFeed tracked down the “Dunkies” woman who went viral for her emphatic appearance on a local TV station in Boston.
- Tony Lewis, lead singer and bassist for The Outfield, died suddenly this week at 62. The band’s guitarist, John Spinks, died in 2014 of cancer.
- Harvardmagazine profiles Louisa Thomas of the New Yorker, who wrote that magazine’s essay on the return of baseball in a pandemic this summer.
- The diabolical ironclad beetle (Nosoderma diabolicum) can withstand forces of 39,000 times its body weight, which would liquefy almost any other creature.
- From late September: MediaMatters’ Matt Gertz explains how Trump rallies overwhelm media members assigned to cover them with so much bullshit that it’s impossible to discuss it all.
- From 2017: The New York Review of Books has a longish piece on the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript. Is it an undecipherable code, or just medieval nonsense?
Why are we still harping about wiping down groceries? Who cares if people want to do that!? The people wiping down groceries are the ones who are being the most careful. People aren’t wiping down groceries and then not washing their hands. They’re not running around without masks. The grocery wipers are the people who are doing EVERYTHING possible. Just leave them alone.
It’s a waste of time, and just creates more trash and pollution for no benefit (and maybe harm – you’re killing everything, even beneficial bacteria).
It’s a waste of my own time, so who cares?
And I’m only wiping packaging. Not food. Who would wipe actual food with Lysol? If that’s what we’re talking about I agree we should stop.
My issue though is the idea that people are wiping food as their only precaution. I think that’s a nonsensical perspective.
I don’t think anyone is saying that last bit.
Wiping packaging with Lysol just creates more waste (of the Lysol/other chemicals, wipes, the containers in which they come). If that stopped the virus, great, wipe away! But it doesn’t seem to have any effect because there are no documented cases of fomite transmission. I think the experts’ point in this article is to educate people to do the things that really do prevent spread.
Your own write up said “don’t wipe food, instead focus on things that really matter,” implying that people wiping food are possibly not washing their hands.
As far as waste goes, if I can reduce my family’s chances of getting COVID by even 0.01%, I’m willing to use 10,000 wipes to do it. That’s a trade off I can live with.
if I can reduce my family’s chances of getting COVID by even 0.01%, I’m willing to use 10,000 wipes to do it
Well, that’s probably not rational, but even so, there’s no evidence that it’ll reduce your chances of getting COVID-19 at all, and there’s (probably) more risk of harm from either killing off beneficial bacteria or inserting chemicals into your environment that have deleterious effects at those concentrations.
As for your first point, I wasn’t implying any such thing. You’re reading way too much into my summary.
Your scouting of Jarred Kelenic and the Wisconsin Foxconn plant groundbreaking were only a few weeks apart back in 2018. Looks like Kelenic will be producing in the majors before the Foxconn plant produces anything.
The Russia microwave story is suspect for a few reasons:
1. It’s highly speculative and is largely sourced off of one CIA guy
2. The microwave weapons in question are large and indiscriminant (tbf, the article mentions this)
3. And the Cuba thing you mention from a couple years ago was….crickets:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/science/sonic-attack-cuba-crickets.html
good thread with more details on this: https://twitter.com/nataliesurely/status/1320797191301173251?s=20
The Barrett criticism is misplaced. The 7th Circuit didn’t throw out the judgment against the prison guard but instead only ruled that the Wisconsin law providing for county employers to indemnify their employees for actions taken within the scope of their employment did not apply to the case. The standard as set forth by Wisconsin courts is that “[c]onduct is not in the scope [of employment] if it is different in kind from that authorized, far beyond the authorized time or space, or too little actuated by a purpose to serve the employer.” It’s hard to argue that the guard’s conduct falls within definition so that the county would be held financially responsible (rather than the guard himself)
The prison guard did the crime while guarding the prison. Is this really what you want to spend your time arguing?
Jason is right though. I think Barrett is awful and it’s abhorrent that they are trying to confirm her now. But in this specific instance, the criticism is unfair. The law in Wisconsin is not whether the employee did the crime while at the place of employment. It’s the standard Jason described. And by that standard, the county should not be held responsible. It’s reasonable to argue that the law should be different (it may be in other jurisdictions), but it’s not the judge’s role to make rulings on what they think the law should be. And we really shouldn’t want them to.
The thing is, she is not simply calling balls and strikes. In that case, she was explicitly overruling the district court finding, meaning that her interpretation is not some universal understanding of the law. Like any other judge, ACB is a politician exercising power to achieve her desired outcomes, which are as you say abhorrent. You might want to reflect on why the level of cruelty ACB regularly inflicts with her rulings is something you are willing to excuse away.
More to the point, if someone is raped by an agent of the state, I’m curious as to what options you think should be available to the victim if not for this.
The district court, though, ignored what it was supposed to do; the three-judge panel, which included a Clinton appointee, wrote, “the district court did not follow what it thought the Wisconsin Supreme Court would do—as required.” This is not a matter of the appellate and trial courts disagreeing as to what the Wisconsin Supreme Court had said; instead, the district court either missed it or chose to ignore it.
Your assertion that she was “a politician exercising power to achieve her desired outcome” is belied by her vote in the other prison-rape case mentioned in the article. There, the issue was not about the county indemnifying its prison guard but whether the county itself, through its policies and deliberate actions or inactions, was liable. If she were simply trying to reach the outcomes she desired, wouldn’t she have been consistent in denying the counties’ monetary liability? Instead, she reached different conclusions due to different laws and circumstances.
You’re falling for their game. Using legalese and deference to authority to turn DENYING JUSTICE FOR A RAPE VICTIM into something banal and obvious. I would suggest you not do that.
Mike, it’s not fair to say I am “willing to excuse away” the level of cruelty in her rulings. I was explicitly referring only to the ruling in question, and I am not defending her or her appointment in any way. But the argument against her is harmed, not helped, by people holding her to account for rulings that are very much in accordance with the law she’s supposed to apply. Attack her on the ones where she didn’t do that. And attack her for accepting this nomination at all, and campaigning with Trump! Those are cases where it is entirely appropriate to attack her.
The sentiment behind the all caps “DENYING JUSTICE FOR A RAPE VICTIM” is, I’m sorry to say, what leads to bad laws and bad judges. Of course rape victims should be entitled to justice, but it should be within the law. And if the laws are bad, then they should be changed. But judges should not substitute their own preferences in place of the law. That leads to really bad decisions, and no doubt it will lead to bad decisions by Barrett herself, because I’m not suggesting she’s above substituting her preferences in place of the law. She just doesn’t seem to have done it in this particular case, even though applying the law led to a crappy outcome for the victim.
Laws aren’t real, only power. Any judge that restores power to people or gives back some of what’s been stolen from them is good. ACB had the chance to do that and did not.
Okay, clearly we just see things like justice and the rule of law differently. I’m concerned that with your approach, we end up with the judge whose viewpoint disagrees with ours, and we can’t object to it in principle because we’ve already accepted that judges can substitute their morality for the law. But that’s a values or a worldview difference that we won’t overcome here. So be it.
Fair enough. I’ll finish by saying that if you let your fear of what the other side will do dictate your actions, then you’ve already lost. If you don’t demand that those who exercise power on your behalf do everything they can to empower you, then they never will.
My worldview w/r/t the law is that laws/rules/whatever only reflects what people have fought for and are willing to fight for. There will never be a black-and-white agreed upon set of rules that supports the assumptions behind your argument.
That’s the thing: judges do NOT exercise power on your behalf (or at least, they shouldn’t – and all too often, as we’re seeing, when they do improperly exercise that power, they do it for people we disagree with). They interpret the rules made by the people who do work on our behalf. We should all aggressively hold to account the people who make those rules, and our society has badly failed to do that. Using the courts is simply not the way to do it.
This has nothing to do with my fear of what the other side will do. The Democrats, if they get into power, should immediately fix the problems in SCOTUS (and in Federal courts) by appointing more judges, because we’ve seen that the ones who are there will make decisions based on their own preferences. The Democrats should impeach ACB. They should try Trump, Barr, and all the rest for their many, many crimes. Screw the other side.
The problem is, with the law there are often way more than two sides. Whatever you support that isn’t quite in line with the view of judges who might otherwise seem to represent you (hunting? pornography? eating meat? Dungeons and Dragons causes satanism? heavy metal causes satanism? video games lead to violence? sports lead to violence? climate change should or shouldn’t be addressed more aggressively? etc.) can very easily have you regretting the power you willingly put in the hands of a handful of unelected people. Just because we don’t like how the law requires a ruling in a given situation does not mean we should expect judges to wield the power to fix it. We should change that law. Fix the system that makes that so difficult to do.