climate change — Page 10

→ June 10, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/10/17.

I’ve been busy this week, with a top 100 draft prospects “Big Board” up for Insiders, and a free article profiling top draft prospect Hunter Greene, who gave me some really thoughtful answers on the topics of preparation, being a two-way player, and baseball’s declining African-American audience. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

I’ll have a new mock draft up tomorrow (Sunday) and my editors and I will update that file until the draft begins Monday evening. I’m also planning to do a chat Monday afternoon as the draft gets closer.

In non-baseball content, BBC America asked me to to rank the main clones on the show Orphan Black, which returns for its fifth and final season tonight on the cable channel. The first four seasons are all available on Amazon Prime, and I highly recommend it.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the cooperative puzzle game Unlock!, which is actually a series of modules that mimic the escape-room experience by asking players to solve riddles on cards and enter codes into a free app on their phones. The publisher sent me four of the modules; I played three before the review, and they’re all difficult but worth playing. The fourth, The Island of Dr. Goorse, was too abstruse, and that’s not just my opinion but the opinion of all five of us who played, including my father, the (retired) electrical engineer and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

And now, the links…

Two longreads from the Atlantic: One on a new approach to treating psychopathy in children; and an educational if meandering longread on bitcoin, blockchain, and the myth of anarcho-currency.
The Royals have partnered with an anti-abortion group that’s known for misleading pregnant women who are considering terminating their pregnancies.
Venezuelan MLB players are facing retaliation for speaking out against their country’s failing government.
The Guardian agrees with me: Orphan Black is television’s smartest show.
mental_floss tells the story of how Monty Python sued ABC to prevent the network from airing their shows.
Bon Appetit looks at where we get all that firewood in restaurant kitchens as cooking over open flame has become trendy again. Two of my favorite meals in the last few years, at Cincinnati’s Sotto and San Francisco’s Cotogna, included food cooked in an open wood-fired-hearth – and in both cases I sat at the counter watching the whole process.
We waste a lot of food, and a huge portion of it is fresh produce. The article suggests buying frozen rather than fresh, which is fine, but we also need to think more about how to preserve what we buy – freezing, pickling, canning, or cooking. Got some firm veg about to turn? Slice it and pour a hot vinegar solution over it for quick pickles. Fruit on the verge? Make jam, or even bake it into a pie. Roast those red peppers and oven-dry those tomatoes. Slice the cabbage and make kimchi, which keeps for months. Most of these techniques are centuries old, but have been lost in the age of convenience and refrigeration.
A reader in my chat this week mentioned the Kooks Burrito controversy in Portland over whether food can be subject to cultural appropriation; Willamette Week asked local chefs, mostly non-white, for their opinions.
Vaccines aren’t just for kids; here are five vaccines adults should get.
Caffeine is showing up in California waterways, which is entirely the result of human activity.
A German think tank argues that climate change will fuel terrorism recruitment, because food and water shortages will create a vulnerable pool of young candidates.
NPR reports that two of its reporters killed in Afghanistan last year were specifically targeted, rather than victims of a random attack.
Massachusetts’ legislature is considering a bill banning schools from using Native American names and symbols as mascots.
Harvard withdrew acceptance offers for ten incoming students for sharing offensive memes in a group chat. I’m fine with this decision, but I understand the argument against such a hardline response, articulated towards the end of the piece.
If you live in North Carolina, well, you live in a state with a legislature as corrupt as those of African pseudo-democracies.
Into the swamp: Esquire‘s Charles Pierce writes that it’s time for Donald Trump to resign – or be forced out.
The President’s “raging” against Jeff Sessions resembles patterns common to autocratic leaders, according to history professors who’ve studied despots from around the world.
Meanwhile, the President and his son Eric appear to have funneled donations to their children’s cancer charity into the Trump business itself, which I kind of thought wasn’t legal.
A beautiful time-waster: Mic.com looks at the 101 most ‘influential’ tweets in history. Most of the tweets I expected to be there were on the list; two more I’d submit were dril’s budget tweet and David J. Roth’s things of that nature tweet. Sadly, eppur si muove didn’t make the cut.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, food waste, harvard, links, tv, vaccines

→ May 27, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/27/17.

My one Insider piece this week was on Luis Robert, his deal with the White Sox, and the poor history of Cuban position player free agents. I did not hold a Klawchat, and will have another mock draft up on Tuesday.

Smart Baseball continues to sell well and I am very grateful to all of you who purchased it. I have about 100 signed bookplates that I can send out to readers who’ve bought the book, and I’ll get that info to everyone soon – probably in my next email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longread: Pro Publica exposes abusive working conditions at Case Farms, the chicken purveyor that provides meat to many major brands including KFC, Taco Bell, Popeye’s, and Boar’s Head. Skip those brands if you’re horrified by what you read here.
Another longread: The Guardian looks at the great London property squeeze, as affordable housing disappears from the metropolis. The same is happening in some American cities – New York and San Francisco come to mind – where many people who work in the city can’t afford to live in or even close to the city. I’m talking about people you expect to be there, like teachers, first responders, even the ‘invisible’ workers in restaurant kitchens and late-night cleaning crews. They need and deserve a place to live.
Make Michigan sick again! A Republican lawmaker there claims rules to let parents opt out of vaccination mandates hurt ‘parental rights,’ oblivious to the irony that it hurts the rights of those parents’ kids to avoid preventable diseases. All religious and philosophical exemptions for vaccinations should be eliminated, period. The science on this is as unequivocal as it gets.
The Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel explains how the Seth Rich conspiracy hoax shows how fake news still works, which was followed two days later by a piece from Rich’s parents asking these nutjobs to stop politicizing their son’s murder. Fox News blowhard Sean Hannequin has taken a “vacation” in the wake of his own reprehensible role in promulgating this insanity. If you want to see how incredibly stupid, gullible, and obstinate otherwise normal-seeming people can be, search Rich’s name on Twitter. But really, don’t do that.
The last 50 years of climate change have brought exceptional plant growth to Antarctica.
Actress-turned-loon Gwyneth Paltrow said recently that anyone who wants to “fuck with” her needs to “bring (their) A-game,” to which one scientist responds, we’re not fucking with you, we’re correcting you.
The NY Times looks at Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ (@ev) quixotic quest to ‘fix’ the Internet by developing a new model for selling content. I don’t think it’s going to work.
A South African hunter was crushed to death by an elephant after it is fatally shot. I have just one question: Why the hell are we still shooting elephants?
A sociology professor from Occidental College (not the deliberate one) writes in TIME that all universities should ban fraternities. I think she gets half the argument right; what she misses is how such social ‘clubs’ can also serve to undermine institutional efforts to fight discrimination and allow wealthy kids to isolate themselves from less privileged classmates – and thus to reinforce the old boys’ network that came about when universities were limited to families who could afford the tuition up front. (That’s the main purpose of “finals clubs,” Harvard’s unofficial, not-exactly-banned alternatives to fraternities, which are under attack and yet have been defended by unlikely voices. I was not a member of any finals club.)
Gunning for Snowflake of the Year honors, Alabama’s Governor Kay Ivey (a Republican) signed a bill preventing local governments from removing Confederate monuments. Remember, this is the same GOP that preaches decentralizing power from the federal government to the states. It’s almost as if the Republican party’s core platform is based on self-interest rather than actual principle.
Not to be outdone, Ayatollah Greg Abbott of Texas joked about shooting reporters just two days after now Representative-elect Greg Gianforte physically assaulted a reporter who asked him about Trumpcare.
The City of Commerce, Texas, is under attack after its police chief illegally let his 14-year-old drive, then accosted and arrested a black woman for driving around them, calling her a “black bitch.” The City has denied the woman’s claim that Crews called her that term, but has offered no explanation for why she was forced to spend a night in jail; she claims it was because she refused to apologize to whoever called her that slur.
A Baltimore attorney was arrested this week for offering a rape victim $3000 to decline to testify, then threatening to deport her.
Morrissey (as in the Smiths) has outed himself as a bigot, especially when it comes to Islam.
An African-American student at Bowie State University was killed by a white University of Maryland student in what authorities are bizarrely not calling a hate crime even though the suspect was a member of a Facebook group that called itself “alt-Reich.”
Meanwhile, the man accused of killing two people on a Portland, Oregon, train is a well-known white supremacist in that area. The victims had tried to intervene when the killer was harassing two Muslim women on the vehicle.
Is the key to fighting superbugs ending our war on less harmful bacteria? In other words, does every bacterial infection need antibiotics? The more we dose ourselves (and our pets and our livestock) with such drugs, the faster we end up with bacteria our drugs can’t kill because we create a process of unnatural selection.
Our President is now actively hurting the U.S. dollar. Add to the list of things I thought Republicans would care about, but that they’re ignoring because it’s inconvenient.
More from Pro Publica: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is a landlord from hell.
Charles Blow wrote las week for the New York Times that there was blood in the water around this Presidency … and in five days it has already been lapped by new disclosures of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Could economic stratification and ecological strain lead to the collapse of western civilization? Of course, the United States is doing its best to find an even faster and more efficient way to achieve the same end.
A physician wrote about the potential disaster of the Administration’s anti-abortion views and proposed policies, which she says “are not grounded in reliable evidence.” The money quote, not just on reproductive rights but this entire Administration: “These appointments are a stunning example of what happens when willful ignorance gains a powerful platform.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, chicken, climate change, environment, food safety, harvard, hoaxes, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 1, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/1/17.

My predictions for 2017, including full standings, playoff stuff, and award winners. If you skipped the intro and got mad online about it, I’ll reiterate here: it’s just for fun. I do not run projections, and I will never beat a well-run model at the predictions game except as a fluke. I also wrote one post earlier in the week covering Cardinals, Tigers, and Atlanta prospects I saw while in Florida; there will be another post coming this weekend. I did not chat because I was in the car or at games all week.

My book is back from the printers! 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.

Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

This week’s big distraction was Mike Pence’s rule about declining to dine alone with a woman who isn’t his wife, a rule that employment lawyer Joanna L. Grossman says is probably illegal.
The House “Science” Committee held a sham hearing on climate change that featured some of the dumbest anti-science questions you could possibly imagine. If any of these clowns is your representative, call his/her office on Monday and voice your support for actual science.
There’s a wide measles outbreak in Romania, with children dying of the disease, thanks to lack of access to health services and idiot parents declining to vaccinate their children.
How about real science? A new paper claims to have discovered the cause of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s a single protein that normally inhibits a particular pathway in the amygdala; when the protein is absent, the pathway becomes overactive and OCD results.
Meanwhile, many states, all in the south and midwest, have at least seen bills introduced that would allow creationism or other anti-science crap to be taught in public schools.
The Cayman Islands are moving forward with a plan to release genetically modified mosquitoes to combat the Zika virus. The mosquito species in question, Aedes aegypti, also spreads dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever. This is distinct from efforts to use specific strains of the Wolbachia bacteria genus to make the mosquitoes resistant to these virii.
This longread from The Chronicle of Higher Education dissects the ongoing troubles at Penn State – caused by Penn State in the aftermath of the school’s inaction on Jerry Sandusky.
The glory of being on the road so much this week was that I missed the crazy mom who claimed human traffickers were stalking her kids at Ikea. This kind of mass hysteria mirrors the way anti-vaccine bullshit and right-wing fake news have spread online in recent years.
Apple accepted, then rejected, an app that tracks US drone strikes. The decision is bizarre, as the app doesn’t appear to violate any of the App Store’s terms of service, and speaks to the problem with a closed format. Even if the company itself didn’t make these decisions, it would be too easy for a government agency to force them to do so.
The two “activists” whose doctored videos at Planned Parenthood made it seem like PP employees were selling fetal body parts have been charged with 15 felonies for their actions. Their attorneys claim they’re “journalists,” but it’s clear by their actions – and lack of any respect for the law or journalistic ethics – that they’re not.
Speaking of abortion rights, Iowa Republicans have proposed a bill that would let an unmarried woman’s parents prevent her from having the medical procedure, even if she were, say, 30 years old. Meanwhile, Arkansas, the one state I haven’t visited and clearly won’t any time soon, passed a law that forces doctors to investigate a patient’s reasons for having an abortion. Does it surprise you to know that Arkansas is also one of the worst states for vaccination rates?
Why did Secretary of Labor nominee Alexander Acosta cut a sweetheart deal with wealthy child molester Jeffrey Epstein?
I didn’t know what the Chinese dish jianbing, a sort of omelet folded into a crispy crepe-like crust, was before I saw this article on where to find it in New York, but I’m interested now.
Texas Monthly barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn goes into the science of smoke, and how smoke can be dirty or clean.
Fellow fans of Studio Ghibli might enjoy this news item on Ghibli-themed teas, available for sale in Japan. I bet those tins show up as collectibles even without the teas inside. It’s not a Ghibli title, but the critically-acclaimed animated film Your Name (Kimi no na wa) will be released on Friday in the U.S.
“Travel tips” posts tend to be useless, but I thought this list from Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern, who travels the world to some seriously off-the-path places, was unusually informative.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chinese cuisine, climate change, evolution, gmo, japanese films, links, vaccines

→ March 4, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/4/17.

No new Insider content this week, although I believe I’ll have a new piece up on Tuesday, assuming all goes to plan. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers Mole Rats in Space, a cooperative game for kids from the designer of Pandemic and Forbidden Desert. It’s pretty fantastic, and I think if you play this you’ll never have to see Chutes and Ladders again.

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.

Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Elizabeth Kolbert, who won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for her book The Sixth Extinction (my review), writes about why facts don’t change our minds, due to confirmation bias and the anchoring effect.
With charter schools in the news again, NPR has a useful primer on what “charter school” means .
It came up because Secretary of Education Betsy Dingbat decided to praise Jim Crow-spawned historically black colleges as examples of “school choice.”
Why were passengers on a domestic flight asked to show identification to CBP agents before they could deplane? The agency later claimed it was “voluntary” but didn’t communicate that to the passengers. If this happens to you, decline and leave the plane. The agents had no legal right to do what they did.
Some links on last Sunday’s Oscars and the ceremony’s totally bonkers finish: Will Leitch writes for The New Republic that it was the most insane ending ever.
ELLE has a balanced take on the potential impact of Casey Affleck’s win and rewarding men who abuse women, although I still think there’s a false analogy at work here when we compare Affleck’s crimes to those of Roman Polanski (drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl) or Woody Allen (molested his adopted daughter), especially since both are directors and have continued to get funding for movies after the allegations against them became well-known.
And then Cosmopolitan played the race card in a piece that starts by saying how Moonlight was robbed of its moment but somehow devolves into unsubstantiated arguments about white privilege and how we were just shocked that white people lost. I really don’t agree with anything in this piece, but you know, gotta hear both sides.
Top Chef Season 14 ended the other night, and Vulture interviewed the two finalists after the show aired, a Q&A that answers a couple of big questions I had while watching the finale.
Recent Top Chef alum Kwame Onwuachi opened a very expensive tasting-menu restaurant in DC’s Shaw district, but it closed earlier this year after just two and a half months. The Ringer chronicles its fall and talks to Onwuachi about what’s next.
Hugh Acheson is opening a sausage shack at Atlanta’s new ballpark. I’m hoping it’ll serve one called Boondoggle Bratwurst.
The Ringer also had a great piece on the ultimate, persistent failure of the current structure of the Olympics, where host cities build massive white elephants to host a two-week event that profits the IOC more than it does the host.
Did anyone catch the stupidity about the so-called “alt left” this week? The New Republic blows that one up in fine fashion, calling the original piece “bad writing in service of a bad argument.”
How about the claim that “300 scientists” have told the current administration that we should withdraw from the UN climate agreement? Well, that’s some bullshit too, as none appear to be climate scientists and some aren’t scientists at all. I hold an MS from Carnegie Mellon and I think I’d qualify for that list, even though my MS is in business (it was a quirk of the school at the time I was there, so my diploma says MS rather than MBA).
The current administration is also backing out of protecting America’s small streams and rivers, even though they’re a critical part of our ecosystem and probably more vulnerable to human disruption.
I will say something in favor of the current admin, though: I agree with the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza that the “Kellyanne on the couch” controversy was incredibly dumb. That’s the wrong thing to get outraged about, and it reeked of the casual sexism that those who oppose 45 like to accuse his supporters of showing.
This twitter thread argues that Trump’s businesses & associates are aiming to land billions of dollars in construction deals. I think the kleptocratic aspects of this administration are taking a backseat to our (justified) anger over the rollbacks in civil rights.
VP Mike Pence used private email for state business as Governor of Indiana, but that’s everywhere now. Less widely reported is that EPA head and climate change denier Scott Pruitt did the same thing while Attorney General of Oklahoma.
If you live in California, there’s a special election on Tuesday, and you should vote NO on Measure S.
This bill was withdrawn since my last post, but if you live in the backwaters of North Carolina – the state willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in business just to make sure locals can safely discriminate against LGBT residents – the state House passed a bill that would let parents put their kids back into games after suffering concussions. You read that right.
The President’s pastor said former Jefferson Airplane/Starship singer Grace Slick has earned a “death sentence” for supporting LGBT charities. Seems like a nice guy.
I just learned of the newest effort to earn statehood for Washington, D.C. The city itself has a population just below that of Alaska, but you can bet the Republican Party will oppose giving two new Senate seats to the Democrats.
The Iowa lawmaker who was trying to force universities to hire equal numbers of conservative and liberal professors faked his resume, claiming a ‘certificate’ from working at Sizzler was a college degree. I can’t believe he’s still in office right now.
A bunch of Idaho teens assaulted a developmentally disabled black classmate, including pushing a coat hanger up his rectum, but the ringleader won’t serve any jail time because the white judge said the crime wasn’t racially motivated, despite evidence to the contrary. I wonder if he’s a member of one of nine recognized hate groups in the state.
Texas refuses to let transgender boy Mack Beggs compete with other boys in wrestling , so he just won the state girls title. I wonder if this changed any Texans’ minds about laws that limit transgender rights.
I mentioned in chat this week that the idea that there are just two biological sexes – which underpins these bigoted, ignorant ‘bathroom bills’ – was a fallacy. This primer on the six most common biological sexes in humans is quite useful and easy to follow, and also explains how a person’s chromosomes and brain may have different sexes. (If you’re confused about the two versus six part, here’s a real quick explanation: We all know about XX vs XY chromosome combinations from high school health. A fetus can also survive with other, less common combinations, with the four most common being X, XXY, XYY, and XXXY. The link doesn’t mention XXX, or trisomy X, perhaps because people born with this are biologically female.)
Pennsylvania introduced “philosophical exemptions” to mandatory vaccination rules a few years ago and uses of that loophole – which allows any parent to sign a form and skip these entirely safe and effective shots – have skyrocketed. Lancaster Online calls for the county and state to tighten these rules.
Google briefly delisted the pseudoscience/scam site Natural News, run by longtime con artist Mike Adams, for violating the search site’s rules, later relisting it after the site complied with Google’s demands. But that link also raises the question of how best to fight fake news and anti-science sites like NN or Mercola.
This excerpt from Leah Carroll’s upcoming memoir, titled “My Mother’s Murder,” was sad and gripping. The book is out on Tuesday from Hachette.
I’ve seen Islamophobes cite the story of Tanveer Ahmed’s murder of Asad Shah in Glasgow as an example of the dangers of letting in Muslim refugees, but naturally, it’s quite a bit more complicated than that. The real issue here is that he’s become an inspiration to hardliners in his native Pakistan for what they see as a justifiable murder on religious (blasphemy) grounds.
Norwegian mass murderer Anders Bering Breivik – a white right-wing extremist who killed 77 people in 2011 – lost his human rights claim against Norway, which has kept him mostly in solitary confinement in three “well-equipped” cells.
Three Burundian women who fled to neighboring Rwanda run a cafe in Kigali by day and report on Burundi’s crisis by night.
Two administrators at Harvard Law School have been accused of looting a fund for disabled students to buy themselves expensive electronic items and, uh, other stuff.
WAVVES singer/guitarist/songwriter Nathan Williams doesn’t mince any words when it comes to former label Warner Brothers. He’s since started his own record label, Ghost Ramp, and WAVVES’ next record, You’re Welcome, will come out on May 19th.
Thirteen-year-old phenom Grace Vanderwaal did a live session in Paste‘s studio that just underlines how talented she is.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2016 best picture nominees, climate change, cognitive psychology, gay rights, links, Music, top chef, vaccines

→ February 18, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/18/17.

For Insiders, I ranked the top prospects for 2017 impact, although we later removed Alex Reyes from the list now that he’s out for the year. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

On the boardgame front, I reviewed the light family-friendly game Imhotep for Paste this week; it was one of the runners-up for the Spiel des Jahres last year, losing to Isle of Skye. Last week, over at Vulture, I wrote about some of the best games for couples.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Two great investigative reads this week from the New York Times. First, the already disastrous legacy of the Rio Olympics, which should serve as a warning to future bidders (but won’t). Brazil is still a poor country, and they’re poorer for the huge investments they made in now-useless infrastructure for the Games. Second, the growing water crisis in Mexico City, one of the world’s largest cities, which also happens to be sinking (as is the other contender for largest city, Shanghai).
Baseball and depression collide in this story on the life and suicide of Jake Eliopoulos, a former day-one draft pick of the Blue Jays who struggled with mental illness and took his own life on his fifth attempt.
Speaking of depression, is it possible that it has an actual purpose in evolutionary terms?
Thanks in part to decriminalizing many drug offenses, the Netherlands has a lot of empty prison cells, so they’re using some to help provide temporary housing to migrants and refugees. Our draconian drug laws and privatized prisons have done far more harm than good, and the Dutch and Portuguese present strong models if we ever want to change our policies.
Austin has a new boardgame bar and restaurant called Vigilante, and I need to visit this place, stat.
Phoenix eats news! The folks behind the wonderful Tacos Chiwas are opening a new tamale place right next door. They’re hoping to have it open around March 4th, just in time for spring training.
Claims about yogurt and other probiotic foods are likely overblown, as research indicates that consuming these foods doesn’t alter the makeup of your body’s microbiome. (They may still be good for you in other ways, of course.)
There’s a coffee shop in Brooklyn that sells an $18 cup of gesha coffee, sparking faux outrage over the price. The coffee costs that much because the beans themselves are hard to grow and of especially high quality. If you don’t want to spend that much, you have plenty of other options, from $4 pour-over cups of still-great coffee on down.
This story is from four months ago, but highlights how climate change seems to be causing a rise in ciguatera toxins’ presence in fish. The toxin can be fatal to humans, as it was in this case, and isn’t removed by cooking.
Meanwhile, a woman in Texas is suing Popeye’s, claiming she got a debilitating screwworm infection from their food. The suit may be baseless – as the article points out, food served at 165 or higher wouldn’t have the live parasites – but I posted it to point out that screwworm infections are almost unheard of in the U.S. now because of a government-run program of eradication using synthetic pesticides in the 1950s.
We might be getting closer to a dengue vaccine, according to that editorial by one of the scientists overseeing some of the trials, where he also explains why vaccine development takes so long. (Hint: One reason is that vaccines have to be incredibly safe to be approved.)
Unfortunately, the vaccine-denial movement is gaining traction, spurred on by President This-is-fine-dog’s open embrace of the debunked vaccine/autism claim. The same writer, Vox’s Julia Belluz, also exposed the bullshit agenda of RFK Jr. and Robert Deniro, who promised $100K to anyone who could prove vaccines are safe, which has already been proven. I’d like to see people skip Deniro’s film festival this year as long as he’s making public health threats like this one. (And, Bob, I’m sorry, but the most likely reason your son has autism is that the DNA in your old-man sperm was degraded.)
A new group called 314 Action is trying to get more scientists to run for elected office, because politicians who think they know more than scientists are dangerous. Remember that Republican Congressman Lamar Smith (Texas, where else?), chair of the House Committee on Science is a raging science denier, notably on climate change.
Texas is really pushing hard to turn the clock back a century or more, but their fight with the NFL over so-called “bathroom bills” that strip protections from LGBTQ citizens looks like a battle they can’t win. I’d like to see MLB step up on this one now that a state with major league teams is trying to pull the same crap North Carolina and Mississippi did.
Get ready for a nationwide, GOP-led assault on voting rights. If the majority won’t support your party – as demographic trends indicate is likely – then the way to retain power is to make it harder for opposing voters to cast their ballots. It’s on all of us to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Trump’s assault on the free press included credentialing a pro-Trump/white nationalist blog whose 28-year-old founder has promised to “troll” other media.
It appears that the White House’s failed travel ban, which they’re promising to reinstate, has already hurt American businesses by deterring international travel to the U.S.. Trump promised to create jobs, but his biggest move to date will likely destroy them.
Haaretz argues that Trump is an anti-Semite, and no Jewish person should support him.
Activist Attorneys General in left-leaning states represent one of the strongest arms of the anti-Trump movement, one that this Vanity Fair editorial argues he underestimated.
Author Kevin Birmingham, whose book The Most Dangerous Book, about the writing and publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, was one of my favorite reads from 2016, spoke at length about the great shame of universities abusing “adjunct” professorships, using such de facto freelancers to keep costs down (even as tuition keeps rising, so where’s that money going?).
There was a very strange heist in London last week – thieves broke into a storage facility and stole over £2 million worth of rare books, including one of the original copies of Copernicus’ treatise on the movement of the sun and planets. No one can figure out why they did it, since such books would be impossible to fence, but there’s fascination over their daring way of getting into the building.
This BBC audio segment explores left-handedness’ prevalence and reasons it exists, as well as debunking “ambidextrousness” and explaining how we can be right-footed or left-eyed (like Lisa Lopes).
Alabama is embroiled in its own scandal, as the corrupt Governor appointed the Attorney General who was supposed to investigate him to Jeff Sessions’ vacated Senate seat.
The Oroville Dam evacuations created a temporary surge in refugees, and a local Sikh temple opened its doors to them, building new connections with their neighbors in the process.
Finally, this piece about why liberals are wrong about Trump is a must-read regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, climate change, coffee, food safety, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 11, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/11/17.

No Insider content this week – you’ve had plenty, so don’t get greedy. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the asymmetrical two-player game The Blood of an Englishman, which is based on Jack and the Beanstalk. I also returned to Vulture with a post on eight great boardgames for couples, in honor of Valentine’s Day.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Detroit Tigers owner and Little Caesars founder Mike Ilitch passed away yesterday. Here’s a 2016 piece on the hidden cost of cheap pizza, where reducing prices often means taking it out of workers’ pockets.
One of the best longreads of the week covered how a Huntington, West Virginia, school official improved school lunches contrary to the meddling efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.
Another great longread: how a young Wikipedia editor/admin is fighting back against misogynist trolls on the site.
Eater has a longread, more a collection of shorter pieces than a single story, on the things people will do to hunt and pick rare mushrooms.
As much as I crush the NCAA for some of its policies, they’re leading the fight against anti-LGBT discrimination right now, including a threatened six-year boycott of North Carolina that would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business over that state’s hate bill HB2, which prevents local governments from passing laws or ordinances protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination.
There’s a potential famine brewing in sub-Saharan Africa thanks to the spread of the fall armyworm, which is devastating crops in Zimbabwe already and may be present in six other African countries. We can talk about organic agriculture all we want, but if a synthetic pesticide stops this worm, it’ll save millions of lives.
Speaking of which, Dr. Paul Offit wrote about how Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring cost millions of lives too, because DDT, while clearly bad for the environment as a broad-use pesticide, is extremely effective at stopping the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria.
Betsy DeVos was confirmed this week as Secretary of Education, but let’s recall the damage she did in Michigan with her charter-school endeavors. I’ve said on here before that I favor at least some school choice, but school choice is not a panacea for underperforming public schools, and her appointment is a potential disaster for public education in this country.
TIME became (I think) the first major publication to run an editorial arguing that it’s time to impeach President Trump. Meanwhile, good journalism keeps coming from unexpected outlets, like Vogue highlighting five things Trump is doing now but for which he attacked Hillary Clinton during the campaign.
Buy stock in telecom giants? The new FCC is going to kill off net neutrality, opening those quasi-monopolies up for greater power to squeeze money from content providers and consumers.
Meanwhile, Republicans across the country are fighting to restrict voting rights, moves that are likely to help their candidates in 2018 and beyond. If you live in such a state, make your voice heard now, before it’s silenced.
Why did House Republicans block a vote on a resolution stating that the Holocaust targeted Jews? Are they so beholden to party that they wouldn’t even vote on a fact?
John Yoo, who was Justice Department official under President George W. Bush and advocated heavy use of executive orders, wrote that President Trump has taken executive power too far. This is like Tony Larussa saying a manager uses too many relievers. And a former National Security Council member also wrote for the New York Times that Steve Bannon shouldn’t be on the NSC.
Are Trump’s opponents falling into his ‘trap’ with their outrage? I don’t know that I agree with this National Review piece’s conclusions, but it’s worth considering that there are still many voters who will nod their heads at his populist moves without considering their consequences.
Is Trump’s fight against the judiciary his Watergate? I doubt it, although there are some parallels.
Marco Rubio has moments where he appears to be one of the few GOP leaders willing to oppose the President or stake out a position near the center, including a little-heard speech he gave this week on the demise of civil disagreements. That’s great, Marco; now vote against your party’s President on something that matters.
Meanwhile, the GOP continues to use the term “fake news” to keep up its attacks on respected, objective journalism outlets, such as Alabama representative Mo Brooks calling the Washington Post fact-checkers “fake news” for pointing out that his voter fraud claims were, well, fraudulent.
Ah, North Dakota, where two Republican legislators said in session that women should spend Sundays taking care of their husbands. Will they face any electoral consequences for this? I doubt it.
Vaccines! There are over 400 mumps cases in Washington State’s outbreak. That’s why Peter Hotez, Ddirector of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, can say that the anti-vaxxers are “winning” in another NYT editorial. (I subscribed to the Times online in the fall, mostly to keep these posts going, because they are producing some tremendous content across the board right now.)
If you saw the Daily Mail piece claiming that politicians had been hoodwinked by falsified climate-change data, well, don’t read the Daily Mail, as it’s become an unreliable source on any economic, political, or scientific topic. And the story was utter nonsense.
Former Top Chef contestant Mark Simmons of NYC’s Kiwiana made his feelings on the Muslim ban quite clear with a pro-immigration message printed on his restaurant’s receipts.
Is artisanal chocolate the next big food trend along the lines of craft beer and coffee? I’m a little skeptical, and this piece glosses over chocolate’s big sourcing issue (there’s a lot of child labor and de facto slavery in the cacao supply chain), but I think there’s a market here for better chocolate that can make consumers feel better about what they’re eating.
An Intelligentsia Coffee staffer wrote this informative post on why we steep tea but brew coffee.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has published research on how to help women and people of color in the film industry, a sort of response to the #OscarsSoWhite criticisms we’ve heard the last few years. (The Oscar nominees are much more diverse this year, quelling such complaints for the moment.) It gets more at the root of the problem than the attacks on the Academy Awards do – you won’t see women nominated for Best Director if women are rarely hired as directors or if their films struggle to find funding or distribution. There were few acclaimed movies in 2016 directed by women; I think the best-reviewed was Certain Women, which received very little distribution at all.
Is mining asteroids an essential part of our future? I think it is, in some sense, although I’m surprised this piece doesn’t mention iridium, a critical element in manufacturing electronics; it’s believed most of the iridium on earth came from the meteor or comet that caused the K/T extinction event.
Vice’s Noisey asked a person with synaesthesia what several songs “taste” like to him. Synaesthesia is a rare brain function where senses ‘cross;’ Vladimir Nabokov had it. I don’t have this, but I do associate all twelve months with certain colors, because when I was maybe five my mom had a Peanuts calendar hanging in our laundry room where January, May, and September were colored in red; February, June, and October in blue; March, July, and November in green; and April, August, and December in yellow. Those months still have those colors to me today.
Humor: This New Yorker fake-dialogue post called “I Work from Home” hit a little close, especially as I’m writing this post at 10:30 am on Saturday while still in my pajamas.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chocolate, climate change, coffee, links, organic agriculture, pizza, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ January 14, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/14/17.

I’ve been writing Top 100 stuff (and making related phone calls) all week, so the only content I wrote that didn’t appear here on the dish was my review of the boardgame DOOM, an adaptation of the 1990s first-person shooter video game and an update of an earlier attempt to make a boardgame of it.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

The Guardian says turning Sherlock into James Bond is unacceptable, and I largely agree – this season’s first two episodes had too much action and gunplay and not enough Sherlockian deduction.
Also, if you’ve seen the Sherlock season opener, the showrunners spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the surprise ending and their vision for the series.
The Internet of Things leaves us all vulnerable to hackers in ways we don’t expect, like controlling cars remotely via malware or over wireless networks.
Let’s talk vaccines. The Director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Center wrote a garbage, anti-vaccine editorial on Cleveland.com that brought up the discreted vaccine-autism link. Why is anyone surprised, given the Cleveland Clinic’s embrace of other forms of woo like naturopathy?
Donald Trump met with noted vaccine-denier RFK Jr., who is batshit insane on this topic, and conservative writer Ben Shapiro gave us eleven reasons why Trump is wrong to buy into this crap.
Seth Mnookin looks at how RFK Jr. “distorted” vaccine science, although I’d call it flat-out lying.
What can the vaccine-denial movement teach us about improving the public’s science literacy? Unfortunately, one of the author’s conclusions is that denialists manipulate parents with appeals to emotion like making it a “freedom of choice” issue, whereas scientists tend to avoid such irrational efforts.
What’s behind the 2016 spike in mumps cases? One response might be to get a third dose of the MMR vaccine, as the mumps component may gradually lose effectiveness over 10-15 years.
The Ringer looked at noted vaccine-denialist and all-around quack Dr. Joseph Mercola, who makes over $10 million a year from his so-called “alternative health” sites.
Mercola’s site has “4,400 articles on the benefits of turmeric.” Too bad research on the benefits of turmeric (specifically curcumin) keeps coming up empty.
This notice to parents from an Alabama pediatrics office is absolute pro-vaccine gold.
WIRED has an oral history of the making of the ESPN documentary O.J.: Made in America, which seems likely to get least get a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars.
Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims he invented e-mail and files nuisance lawsuits against sites that dispute this, is now suing Techdirt for the same thing, a lawsuit that could put the site out of business. He’s backed by billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who also backed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. Ars Technica has a little more detail on the suit, and on why Ayyadurai is wrong. Lots of folks responded to my tweet about this by saying, in essence, that Gawker got what it deserved, but 1) that’s irrelevant to this case and 2) Gawker only posted the Hogan video after a federal court ruled it was newsworthy, making the results of Hogan’s lawsuit hard to explain.
Derrick Goold wrote about a novel type of elbow surgery that may bring Seth Maness back to the big leagues in about half the time it would have taken after Tommy John (ligament transplant) surgery. Maness’s tear was in the right location, near an attachment point, and the ligament was otherwise in good enough shape that he qualified for the new procedure.
Rye bread – I mean real rye bread, the dark, nutty stuff, made with whole-grain rye or even rye berries, is making a comeback. It’s a lower-gluten relative of wheat, so breads made primarily or wholly with rye flour tend to be denser than wheat breads, but I think rye has a more interesting, complex taste than commercial whole wheat flours.
I figure most of you have seen this, but just in case, GQ had a great longread on the diaries of a HS football player who killed himself after suffering from concussion-related CTE. He left detailed instructions for his parents to spread the story of what football did to his brain. It’s a wrenching read, and I wish someone would wallpaper Roger Goodell’s office with it.
Have you seen those cheesy infomercials for MyPillow? Well, the owner may have broken the law with his neverending “buy one get one free” promotion, which also cost the company its BBB rating. It’s kind of a story of the owner’s arrogance, figuring that if something works for his business it must be OK.
Princeton Professor Cornel West reflects on what he calls the sad legacy of President Obama. It’s worth reading, but the essence is that the practical results of Obama’s policies were not progressive enough for his supporters on the left.
There’s real hope for the first time in the forty years since the island’s division that Cyprus could be reunited via a tripartite peace deal, although Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan later dismissed the possibility of a full Turkish troop withdrawal from the divided island. (Given the history of both the Turkish and Greek governments in Cyprus, I kind of don’t blame him.)
Climate change is causing China’s largest desert to expand at an alarming rate, displacing people and turning thousands of acres uninhabitable.
With climate-change denial the official policy of the President-Elect and the party that controls both houses of congress, a new group is trying to recruit scientists to run for office so that we get some rational thinking in our government.
A North Korean boy who was abandoned by his parents and lived on the streets of Pyongyang shared his story with the BBC, including his eventual escape to South Korea.
Russia’s parliament moved to decriminalize domestic violence this week.
And now, to the outhouse … The Trump-Russia connection became more sordid and problematic this week, as the BBC’s award-winning Paul Wood explains in a measured piece that doesn’t quite go as far as BuzzFeed did in revealing the documents.
Charles Pierce explains how no one knows what comes next. He compares Trump to Captain Ahab, but I think he’s more Captain Queeg.
Trump’s plan to name his son-in-law Jared Kushner to a key advisory post is his first attempt to ignore the law, specifically a 1967 law that prohibits this sort of nepotism. My fear isn’t that he’ll do it, but that no one will challenge it.
Betsy DeVos, a creationist nutjob who gave a lot of money to the GOP and coincidentally has been nominated to be our next Secretary of Education, conveniently “forgot” a $125,000 donation she made to support an anti-union ballot measure in Michigan.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bread, climate change, links, sherlock, vaccines

→ December 10, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/10/16.

I wrote a bunch of stuff this week to cover all the major transactions before and during the winter meetings, including:

• The Cardinals signing Dexter Fowler
• The Yankees signing Aroldis Chapman
• The Nationals’ trade for Adam Eaton
• The Cubs/Royals trade with Wade Davis and Jorge Soler
• The Rockies signing Ian Desmond
• The Rays signing Wilson Ramos
• The Red Sox trading for Chris Sale
• The Red Sox trading for Tyler Thornburg
• The Giants signing Mark Melancon
• The Yankees signing Matt Holliday
• The Astros signing Carlos Beltran

I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Terraforming Mars, one of the best new boardgames of 2016, and one that will place high on my ranking of the top ten games of the year when that’s published in the next few days.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

I doubt there’s been a more important story in the U.S. this past week than the CIA’s conclusion that Russia tried to help Trump win the election, providing hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks while apparently keeping hacked RNC emails to themselves. I truly don’t know where this goes from here.
Meanwhile, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory conceded defeat in this year’s election, ending fears that state Republicans would use a special legislative session and court-packing trick to try to overturn the popular vote. McCrory’s loss appears to have been at least in part due to his support of state HB2, the so-called ‘bathroom bill’ that also banned local ordinances that protected LGBT citizens from discrimination. Texas, learning nothing from this, is trying to pass the same sort of bill in its quest to roll back the clock a hundred years.
Trump’s continued refusal to sell his businesses creates an unprecedented tangle for him and his family, with evidence already mounting that he’s misusing his status as President-Elect to secure new deals for his business.
Mayors of the world’s biggest cities pledged at the recent C40 summit to act against climate change even if Trump won’t.
Does Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense harbor a decades-old grudge against Iran?
Carrier’s labor union leader said Trump “lied his ass off” about his role in keeping the manufacturer’s plant in Indiana.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich had a few things to say to Trump in a CNN appearance this week.
The man behind Ohio’s bill to essentially ban abortion in the state was accused in 2011 by his wife of abusing her.
A deranged man who believes everything he reads on the Internet brought a gun to a DC pizza shop and fired it, claiming he was “self-investigating” the lunatic conspiracy theory that the shop, Comet Ping-Pong, is a front for … I can’t even say it. These people are too fucking stupid for words.
Actress Sofia Vergara is facing a lawsuit from her own embryos, in effect saying she’s denying their right to be born. It’s really a money grab by her ex-husband, but the consequences of a successful suit here are chilling.
South Korea’s legislature has impeached the country’s President over a corruption scandal; she’s suspended from office now while the case goes to the country’s high court.
MTV News has a great profile of the nephew of defeated Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh; Jammeh’s nephew is gay and spoke out against his uncle’s policies against LGBT Gambians and statements like his 2015 promise to “slit the throats” of gay men in Gambia.
Is the key to boosting Nicaragua’s economy getting more women into the labor force?
A Pentagon study showed how the agency could save $25 billion a year by reducing wasteful administrative costs, so the agency buried it.
A study by the American Automobile Association found that drivers who drive on less than seven hours of sleep are much more likely to crash, with the probability doubling from seven hours of sleep to the range from five to six.
What’s the difference between speaking a language and being fluent in it?
For decades physicists have assumed dark matter exists and accounts for much of the universe’s missing mass, but a new theory holds that it’s not real and that its place in physics is replaced by “dark energy,” which produces the gravity (via quantum interactions) that we attribute to the invisible matter.
The New Yorker has a profile of A Tribe Called Quest and their final album, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 and is still in the top 15 three weeks later.
Author Ann Patchett, whose Bel Canto is one of my 50 favorite novels ever, gave the New York Times her guide to independent bookstores for folks who visit such shrines the way many tourists seek out museums or old churches.
Former professional blackjack and poker player Cat Hulbert told the BBC her life story of beating male gamblers who underestimated her in a rambling but still fascinating narrative that explains some of the many lows she hit while playing cards for a living.
You can watch evolution happen in a giant Petri dish in a lab at Harvard where scientists are studying bacteria to see how antibiotic resistance occurs and how we might fight it. (Link includes a five-minute video.)
Tim Grierson and Will Leitch give movie-fan dilettantes like me a viewers’ guide to what movies might earn Oscar nominations. I need to get to the theater.
Give money to food banks, not canned goods. We have a local food bank in Delaware with a rating of 95% or so on Charity Navigator, and they’ve been my main target for charitable giving lately for the same reasons this article lays out.
Doctors at Yale New Haven Hospital saved a man’s life using an old but still novel approach to fighting a bacterial infection called “phage therapy,” where the patient gets a dose of bacteriophages, virii that specifically infect bacteria.
An artist or group of artists calling themselves Anonymouse made a tiny art installation of shops for mice on a street in Sweden.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2016 movies, africa, ann patchett, climate change, evolution, hip-hop, Languages, links, physics, stick to baseball, tin foil hats

→ December 3, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/3/16.

I had a couple of Insider pieces this week, on the trade of Jaime Garcia to Atlanta, the Cespedes contract, the trade of Alex Jackson to Atlanta, and my proposal for an international draft (written before the CBA negotiations ended). I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers Grifters, a “deckbuilder without a deck” that I thought played a little too mechanically.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

An important longread from Scientific American: How factory farming is speeding antibiotic resistance, endangering animals and humans alike, while the government does virtually nothing to stop them. The best thing we can all do is buy only meat from animals raised without antibiotics – organic is not necessary for this but it does qualify – or just don’t eat meat. The article also details some of the oppressive conditions in the ‘contract growing’ business of raising animals for food.
Another longread, this time from the Guardian, on Italy’s “ultras,” dangerous gangs of soccer fans who exert unusual control over the sport and are behind much of the violence that surrounds the sport.
I linked to this on Twitter earlier in the week: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote about the disastrous policies of Henry Kissinger in Southeast Asia, which led to millions of civilian and military deaths.
The House Science Committee is notoriously hostile to real science, something that became apparent again this week when its official account tweeted a link to a climate-denial article at a neo-Nazi site.
The FTC finally did something good! They’re requiring so-called “homeopathic medicines” to include a label that says there’s no evidence they work. That’s because they can’t work. Homeopathy, like cupping and acupressure, is just woo.
The Kansas government of Governor Sam Brownback has been an economic disaster, but it’s also been a test tube for voter-suppression tactics, like requiring proof that voters are Americans, even though the state could only identify three non-citizens who voted in the ten years before the law in question was passed.
A junk study claiming a link between vaccines and autism has been pulled following heavy criticism. I doubt that’ll stop deniers from using it, though.
And those same looney-toons think that Donald Trump will be an ally for their cause. Given his actions so far as President-Elect, I think he’ll throw them overboard the moment it’s politically expedient.
A federal judge ruled that counties in Hawai’i can’t ban genetically modified crops because state law prohibits counties from legislating agricultural issues. It’s painted as a win for Big Ag, but it’s also a win for science.
Research by the Pew Center finds that Americans don’t understand the meaning or import of organic or GMO food. Organic food is not more healthful to your body than conventionally-grown food, although it may be better for the soil, and GM food is not less healthful or more dangerous than non-GM food.
Why are some Massachusetts district attorneys refusing to reveal lists of cases they’ve prosecuted, in violation of state public records laws? The Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team is suing to get those records opened. Real journalism still exists, and I think it will matter in the next four years more than it has in decades.
The Daily Beast has a piece on Casey Affleck’s disturbing history of alleged harassment of women, including abusive behavior.
This Washington Post feature on the effort by the San Bernadino terrorists’ siblings to adopt the killers’ infant daughter is heartbreaking.
Rising ocean temperatures resulted in the worst bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef on record. Increasing carbon sequestration in the oceans raises the water temperature and lowers its pH. Both are bad for coral.
I loved the short-lived animated TV series The Critic, especially its crazy movie parodies, so I was thrilled to read this UPROXX conversation with the two creators.
News outlets are belatedly telling their writers not to use the term “alt-right” any longer, because it’s a euphemism for white nationalist, white supremacist, or neo-Nazi.
Another white-nationalist type has started a blacklist website devoted to identifying left-wing college professors, and Emory University Professor George Yancy is having none of it.
Miami Herald writer Armando Seguero absolutely lights up Colin Kaepernick for wearing a Fidel Castro shirt in a column published hours before the brutal, repressive Cuban dictator’s death was announced.
Many folks weighed in on Joe Posnanski’s columns about the WAR discrepancy between Justin Verlander and Rick Porcello; I particularly enjoyed Phil Birnbaum’s explanation of why the Baseball-Reference approach makes sense. You should read Birnbaum’s post, but in essence, he says that we should deduce from Verlander’s performance that he was the beneficiary of help from his defense, even though Detroit’s defense on the whole was not good.
Is the Internet a “failed state” along the lines of Somalia or now Libya? This Guardian op ed argues that the increasing lawlessness online makes it so.
Bloomberg View/Gadfly executive editor Timothy L. O’Brien argues that Donald Trump’s business is not too big to sell, and the President-Elect needs to sell before he takes office.
Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services is a member of a fringe, far-right, anti-science doctors’ group whose positions include opposition to mandatory vaccinations, opposition to abortion, opposition to stem cell research, and opposition to organ donations, and whose journal is “a repository for quackery.”
The Columbia Journalism Review profiles the overhaul and success of the Washington Post in a wide-ranging conversation with two of the digital media company’s leaders – although I think some of what they reveal is less flattering than they think.
Baltimore is attacking street violence by treating it as a public-health problem, not as a typical crime.
Let’s get to the Trump stuff: One potential pick to head NIH is opposed to stem-cell research and faces much opposition even within Republican circles.
His pick for Secretary of Education is a blow to our nation’s science health. She’s also a disaster for church-state separation, proposing more school-choice programs to allow parents to send kids to religious schools using government dollars, and with ties to the ‘intelligent design’ pseudoscience movement.
Reince Preibus confirmed that Trump’s default position on climate change is denial.
That Carrier deal? It shows Trump and Pence don’t understand the constant churn of jobs in our modern economy.
The NY Times editorial board published a blunt column on Trump’s flag-burning tweet saying Mr. Trump, meet the Constitution.
After Trump won the election, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors issued a (symbolic) resolution saying they would oppose much of what he and the GOP stand for. Of course, it’ll matter when they act, or take the feds to court, but I wish more local politicians were so vocal about their opposition.
From June, a great New Yorker piece on just what a colossal scam Trump University was.
Here are a few of the Senate Democrats who’ve spoken out against Trump so far.
A Texas town’s mayor and government just learned it has had an independent housing authority for the last 40 years, which means that department, which had two employees, has had essentially zero oversight and, of course, hasn’t been fulfilling its mission to maintain living conditions in public housing.
The BBC spoke to hyperglots, speakers of many languages, about how they learned and retained so many tongues and why some people seem better able to do so.
A Canadian town’s police department has threatened to force people arrested for driving drunk to listen to Nickelback.
A 19-year-old Guatemalan woman with Down Syndrome has started a clothing line for other women with the genetic disorder.
Tweet of the week:

Quick recap: the new ed secretary is anti-public schools, the new HUD sec'y is anti-Fair Housing, and the new AG is anti-Voting Rights Act.

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) November 28, 2016

But to that, you can add that the new HHS head is anti-science, and the potential Secretary of State is still on probation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, climate change, food safety, Languages, links, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 12, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/12/16.

I ranked the top 50 free agents available this offseason, for Insiders; once these guys start signing, I’ll post reaction pieces as appropriate. My annual offseason buyers guide series started on Friday with the outfield market; the infielders guide will go up today, followed by relievers Sunday and starters on Monday. I wrote an overview of the potential for big trades this winter, given the weak free agent class.

I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday, but there will be no chat this upcoming week.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers Cones of … I mean, Council of Blackthorn, a pretty good backstabbing game that I think has one major mechanical flaw.

I also updated my all-time favorite boardgame rankings, which now runs to 100 titles. I think that’s plenty, even with the 40-50 or so I try each year for review purposes.

I’m going to start this week with reactions to the election of Donald Trump and the Republicans’ de facto control of all three branches of the federal government (assuming they fill the SCOTUS vacancy with one of their own). If you read just one story about the election, make it this one, on how the GOP’s attack on voting rights may have delivered them the White House. If you support the erosion of the voting rights of American citizens, you stand in opposition to a fundamental principle of the modern democracy. Rolling the clock back to the time of poll taxes and literacy tests just to get your guy elected is wrong, and every one of us should be willing to see a candidate we oppose elected if that is the cost of letting everyone who is eligible to vote have the opportunity to vote. If you live in one of the fourteen states that worked to restrict voting rights, you need to stand up now for yourself and for your neighbors.
Rod Dreher, senior editor of the American Conservative, called this America’s front-porch revolt. Michael Moore, of all people, predicted the Trump victory months ago and I think he’s correct about the economic insecurity that drove it. (His five-point “plan” for Democrats is a little light on details.) Glenn Greenwald points out that this was partly the result of politicians’ refusal to heed the lessons of Brexit, that (my words here) economic insecurity and self-interest will trump (pun intended) a lot of other concerns. Esquire‘s Charles Pierce is just plain confused by it all. David Remnick of the New Yorker called Trump’s victory an American tragedy. Unlike the book of that name, however, this won’t be boring, even if the ending is just as awful.
Garrison Keillor says Trump’s core voters won’t like what happens next; I suspect he’s right about much of this. Amanda Taub of the New York Times calls the win the rise of white populism, using social science research to identify three driving factors there – fear of outsiders, fear of physical attacks, and the collapse of “white identity.”
Even Leslie Knope weighed in, with her usual dose of wide-eyed optimism after despair.
A Muslim-American woman wrote for the Washington Post why she voted for Donald Trump. It’s an eloquent, thoughful piece, although I wish I shared her lack of concern over civil rights matters.
Climate Central says we’re fucked. Scientists in general are stunned and dismayed as the most anti-science President in our nation’s history is set to control the EPA, the NSF, the USDA … okay, that one sucks, but you get the idea.
The Guardian wrote before the election how journalists face “tough choices” when climate science deniers are elected. No, they don’t. You fucking hit them with the truth every time. There is no ‘both sides’ here, like there’s no both sides on evolution or vaccinations. If politicians, elected or appointed, deny the truth of climate change, then it is the media’s responsibility to stick to the truth rather than play along for their jobs’ sakes.
Did third-party voters cost Hillary the election? I find this piece overly speculative, since some of those voters may have stayed home rather than vote for either major-party candidate, but if you consider the issue of, say, Hillary failing to convince Jill Stein supporters to come vote for her, there’s merit in the examination.
“A KKK-endorsed man who openly bragged about assaulting women has risen to power by stoking rural, white Americans’ fears, and, come January, every branch of the federal government will belong to him and his allies.” Ann Friedman at the Cut tells voters angry over the results what to do now.
North Carolina’s HB2, the so-called “bathroom bill” that also created a statewide ban on ordinances protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination, may have cost Republican Governor Pat McCrory re-election. The race is close enough that provisional ballots must still be counted, so it’s not quite over yet. Yet despite this, Trump took North Carolina, in part by suppressing the African-American vote.
Kavitha Davidson, my colleague at the magazine and ESPNW, wrote about being a rape survivor, including a graphic description of how invasive the examination is at the hospital after the fact, for those of you who still think women just make this shit up for kicks.
The best longread of the week, election or otherwise, was the New Yorker‘s piece on the failing state of Venezuela, which has implications for baseball, oil, and global security. Hugo Chavez was a disaster, but his death has left the country even worse off.
The mother of comedian and writer Harris Wittels, who wrote for and appeared on Parks and Recreation, writes about her son’s long battle with and death from heroin addiction.
Astronomers around the world will collaborate in the spring of 2017 to try to take the first picture of a black hole. That’s tricker than it sounds, since nothing, not even light, can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull within its event horizon.
Researchers in Queensland, Australia, are trying to develop the first ‘vaccines’ for food allergies. With such allergies on the rise in the developed world, this could be a lifesaving invention for millions of people.
California voters rejected Proposition 60, which would have required porn stars to wear condoms on screen, but was opposed by public health groups as well as the industry itself as a backdoor (pun unintended) attempt to drive the industry out of state.
Does Trader Joes force its employees to act too cheerful? The New York Times explores some employee complaints about the privately-held retailer, which enjoys a cult following on both coasts (of which I am very much a member).
The NY Times article from last week claiming GM crops didn’t deliver promised results was flawed, but so were some responses to it, in part because of misunderstandings of the technology itself.
The Times also had an article just before the election on Latina hotel workers gaining a political voice in Nevada, one of the only swing states to end up on Clinton’s side on Tuesday. The article is extremely well-written and even David Simon praised its kicker at the end.
The BBC visits a private radio station in Damascus, still playing music and sharing news in the midst of the country’s devastating civil war.
A new strain of meningococcal disease is on the rise in Australia, raising calls for the relevant vaccine to become part of that country’s required list of childhood vaccinations.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, gmo, health, links, stick to baseball

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