environment — Page 7

December 29, 2018 · 8 comments

Stick to baseball, 12/29/18.

I’ve had several ESPN+ pieces in the last two weeks, including my Hall of Fame ballot and explanation, my analyses of the Jurickson Profar trade and that huge Reds-Dodgers trade, and a post that covered the Michael Brantley and Wilson Ramos signings. I held a Klawchat here on the 20th.

On the board game front, my year-end articles went up two weeks ago – my top ten games of 2018 for Paste and my best games by category for Vulture.

Here on the dish, I posted my top 100 songs of 2018 and top 18 albums of 2018 that same week.

My free email newsletter will resume next week. Join the five thousand other satisfied customers who’ve already signed up for occasional goodness.

And now, the links…

Longreads first, as always: Marc Randazza, a lawyer who represents or has represented several major neo-Nazi and white nationalist figures in lawsuits, has a very long history of legal misconduct, much of it dating from his time working for gay porn producers, but has only received a slap on the wrist from the Nevada Bar for his misdeeds, detailed in this lengthy Huffington Post piece.

Former U.S. Marine Lyle Jeremy Rubin writes in the Guardian about what he learned about America while serving in Afghanistan. “For me the empire is rooted in the barbarism it pretends to oppose.”
Amazon’s Marketplace is enormous and part of why the company controls half of the U.S. retail market, but The Verge reports on the byzantine process of suspensions and how sellers use it to attack rivals on the site.
The Athletic looks at the disastrous two-year reign of Mike Piazza in Reggio Emilia, where he bought a Serie C soccer club and ran it into the ground (subscription required).
Katie Prout writes about her brother’s longtime alcoholism and her own mental health struggles over at Longreads.
ProPublica investigates the banana republic that is Louisiana, where former legislators turn into lobbyists or take jobs in the executive branch and continue to wield outsized power to line their own pockets, often in ways that harm the populace.
A study published in the Journal of Science Communication found that scientists who engage in debates with deniers may do more harm than good (PDF link) to the causes they support, such as climate change or evolution, because such beliefs are immovable especially when founded in religious beliefs.
Natalie Wood’s final film, Brainstorm, deserves a better legacy than it’s received, according to Popular Mechanics. I’d never heard of the movie before this piece, and I am old enough to remember Wood’s death and thus the time this film hit theaters.
Shirley Wang’s piece on her late father’s surprising friendship with Charles Barkley went viral last week for good reason.
This unrolled Twitter thread highlights one investigative journalism piece from each of the 50 states this year, including an item in the Delaware News-Journal about courts banning people from entering the city of Wilmington for trivial infractions like loitering or panhandling.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found that Bryan Kemp (guess) used a real warning of voting database vulnerability into a political attack against Stacey Abrams that may have tipped the Georgia gubernatorial election into his favor.
Detained migrants are being used as slave labor in private prisons funded by taxpayer dollars.
Texas is one of many states that has ignored the First Amendment and passed laws prohibiting state employees from supporting Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) efforts against Israel – similar to efforts used, perhaps with some success, against the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1970s to early 1990s. A Palestinian-American speech pathologist in Texas lost her job for refusing to sign a pro-Israel oath, which, if I may say so, is utterly fucking terrifying: You should never have to sign an oath to hold a job in the United States. She’s suing, and I hope Texans realize they’ll foot the bill for this lawsuit with their taxes.
The University of Utah and local police were warned six times in ten days by Lauren McCluskey that her ex-boyfriend was threatening her, but they did nothing. He killed her on October 22nd.
Eater has an excerpt from the forthcoming book You and I Eat the Same on how just about all of us love fried chicken.
New York‘s Intelligencer has two great pieces on the awful state of online right now: how so much of what happens on the Internet is fake, and why Youtube star PewDiePie can make anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi jokes and still thrive. It’s all generally bad news for society in general, and for those of us who make our livings online in particular.
The Obama Administration tried to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, exposure to which leads to serious neuromuscular problems in humans and may lead to cancer over time, but former EPA head Scott Pruitt denied the application to ban it; the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that the EPA must ban all sales of the chemical within 60 days of its ruling. In the interim, however, millions of pounds of chlorpyrifos were dumped on U.S. crops, one of many examples of how the Trump Administration’s rollbacks of environmental regulations have harmed U.S. workers.
OUT looks at Ruth Coker Burks, who helped care for hundreds of gay men dying of AIDS in a piece from 2016.
The Cut points out that the attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez derive from fear that women of color might start to wield real power, the kind only white men have had in our country’s history to date.
New Jersey Democrats tried to gerrymander the state to protect incumbents and thus the party’s control of the legislature, but pressure from their own supporters led them to drop the plan. It’s funny how that hasn’t happened in other states, like Wisconsin or Michigan, where Republicans have similarly tried anti-democratic efforts to retain power.
You’ve likely seen by now that Michael Cohen’s cell phone was in Prague around the time of a meeting with the Russians, yet more circumstantial evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin government – plus more hard evidence Cohen lied. But what I found most notable is who broke the story: McClatchy Washington Bureau, the DC arm of former Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy’s publishing empire.
An award-winning German reporter who garnered praise and hardware for his dispatches from Trump-voting areas of the United States fabricated nearly all of his stories.
The news that a federal judge in Texas ruled the ACA’s mandate unconstitutional, a ruling widely criticized by legal experts across the political spectrum, was symptomatic of a larger problem: Our federal judiciary has been packed with arch-conservative judges, and removing or replacing them will be difficult if not impossible.
An Australian woman whose 32-day-old infant died of pertussis has some things to say to anti-vaccine lunatics. Australia cracked down on vaccine denialists with its “No Jab, No Play” policy, ending all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren; it’s high time the United States does the same.
Scientists may have discovered the brain circuit that causes seasonal depression in 20% of people, a discovery that also supports the use of light therapy as a treatment.
The Atlantic‘s Amanda Mull looks at the rising popularity of “anxiety baking,” although I tend to think of it as just “baking,” where the anxiety dictates how much I eat afterwards.
The Washington Post‘s media columnist Margaret Sullivan writes that news outlets need to stop booking Kellyanne Conway.
Sinclair Broadcast Group fired a reporter who was on sick leave with bone cancer, although the company disputes that version of events.
The cold season in Arizona has warmed by 3.5 degrees in 50 years due to climate change, one of many facts in this Arizona Republic wrapup that should disturb residents of the state. Phoenix experienced a 119-day dry spell this year, and in mid-July 97% of the state was experiencing “severe drought” conditions.
The New York Times investigates claims that Planned Parenthood has discriminated against pregnant employees. The headline likely overstates the case, since one issue is failing to offer benefits that the company says they can’t afford, but other aspects are definitely troubling.
Former Runaways bassist and sexual assault survivor Jackie Fuchs (f.k.a. Jackie Fox) recently had a five-day winning streak as a Jeopardy! contestant. She’s also a fan of heavy Eurogames.
Your 30-day trial with Black Patience has expired.
Deepwater Gaming announced the early 2019 release of Claim, a two-player trick-taking game that is already out in Europe.

Tagged climate change, delaware, denialism, environment, fried chicken, georgia, italy, links, louisiana, mental health, new jersey, soccer, stick to baseball, texas, utah, vaccines

December 15, 2018 · 18 comments

Stick to baseball, 12/15/18.

This week’s MLB winter meetings weren’t great, but I did write up a few moves: Cleveland’s trades for Carlos Santana & Jake Bauers, the signings of Joe Kelly and Jeurys Familia, the Lance Lynn signing & Tanner Roark trade, the Rays’ signing of Charlie Morton, and the Phillies’ signing of Andrew McCutchen.

On the board game front, I wrote up every game I tried at PAX Unplugged for Paste, and reviewed the Terraforming Mars app (on Steam) for Ars Technica.

I resumed my free email newsletter this week, after a longer break than I wanted due to those same stupid meetings and stupid prospect calls getting in the stupid way, but you should join the over 5000 current subscribers for even more of my words.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: At the Hardball Times, Stephanie Springer writes about scouting makeup in an era where some teams are eliminating scouting jobs. I’m quoted in the piece.
The Washington Post details how the Bradford pear tree became an invasive species after its sterile fruit became fertile through proximity to callery pear trees.
The Atlantic‘s George Packer asks how the Republican Party got so corrupt, doing whatever it possibly can to maintain power even after crushing electoral losses last month.
Attorney and former federal prosecutor Ken White wrote that “Individual 1” is in grave (legal) danger, based on the contents of memos released by the Mueller investigation on December 7th. Womp womp.
A Baylor student drugged and raped a woman but was allowed to plead guilty, paying a $400 fine, without having to register as a sex offender. Meanwhile, Cyntoia Brown, a Tennessee woman who was trafficked and killed the man who ‘bought’ her as a sex slave, must serve 51 years in prison for the killing. Do you feel safer?
Prion diseases, including “mad cow disease,” are terrifying enough. Now scientists have learned that these nearly indestructible proteins seed victims’ eyes. Prions aren’t alive, but they can self-replicate, and the diseases they are known to cause are all incurable.
An archaeology team working in Azerbaijan found a 4000-year-old board game carved into the earth.
Food52 writer Eric Kim discusses how an annual trip from NYC to Maine helps him deal with his depression.
Scientists are examining the ice core on remote Bouvet Island to learn about the past wind patterns and sea ice extensions from Antarctica, in part to figure out if man’s actions are changing them.
Yet another study has shown that GMOs do not cause cancer, part of a €15 million response to a junk study published in 2012. The resulting years of further research has wasted time, money, and the lives of thousands of rats.
One major reason I sold my house in Arizona and moved back east was my belief that climate change and profoundly stupid state & local governments would lead to serious water shortages in the not-too-distant future. Well, the Phoenix City Council justified my fear by voting down a modest hike in the city’s low water rates, the proceeds of which were supposed to go to improving infrastructure and allowing the city to draw more water from existing ground supplies, rather than the depleted Colorado River.
Speaking of the profoundly stupid local governments in Arizona, the Phoenix City Council was also set to subsidize the Phoenix Suns’ arena renovations before public outcry set in and they delayed their vote. You may have seen 90-year-old Greta Rogers tearing into the Suns’ owner as she spoke at a public hearing on the deal; the Phoenix New Times then interviewed her, and it’s wonderful.
Democrats are trying to further gerrymander New Jersey in a naked power grab that would fit with the current Republican playbook in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. There’s at least some pushback within the Democratic Party, but not enough so far to stop this antidemocratic effort.
West Virginia voted for Trump in 2016, but their economy has gotten much worse under his reign, including a spike in the state’s already high poverty rate.
The Trump Administration wants to make it easier for corporations to pollute waterways and destroy wetlands, because fuck the planet.
The EPA is now supporting that effort by circulating an editorial from a newspaper owned by climate-denying GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, whose wife just happened to get a Presidential Medal of Freedom last month. I’m sure that’s all coincidental!
North Carolina’s 9th District election, plagued by electoral fraud committed by a GOP operative, is such a mess that both parties may agree to hold a new election. The question will then be whether the Republican who won the tainted poll, Mark Harris, would be allowed to run again, even though the allegations – the operative appears to have illegally collected absentee ballots and then failed to submit them to try to suppress votes for Harris’ opponent – are connected to his camp.
We all know Fox & Friends operates in some sort of alternate universe when it comes to facts, but claiming Obama paid off mistresses just like Trump did seems like a new low. (To be clear: He didn’t.)
Russian spy Maria Butina pled guilty on Thursday to conspiracy charges, and her partner, a GOP operative, suddenly registered as a foreign agent, as did a former colleague of his who’s on the NRA’s board of directors.
An Irish TD (legislator) has proposed a bill that would ban ads telling cancer patients that medical treatment is unnecessary so they can sell those patients quack treatments instead.
Americans use way too many paper towels.
Bread is just not bad for you, unless you’re among the ~6% of the population with celiac disease or a wheat allergy. Anyone claiming it causes “wheat belly” or “grain brain” does so in contravention of the available scientific research on bread consumption. And whole grain breads are good for you.
The flailing New York Times tweeted a request for travelers’ stories of experiencing crime in London, but dry Brit wit hijacked their futile endeavor.
The Department of Homeland Security posted a message in favor of the border wall that was strangely devoid of definite or indefinite articles, as if the message had first been written in, say, Russian.

Tagged baseball, boardgames, bread, environment, gmos, links, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, west virginia

November 17, 2018 · 6 comments

Stick to baseball, 11/17/18.

My one piece for ESPN+ subscribers this week looked at some major names on the trade market this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I appeared on the Pros and Prose podcast to talk about Smart Baseball and other topics related to the book and reading/writing in general.

I’m back to sending out my free email newsletter every week to ten days or so, as the spirits move me. The spirits usually include rum, of course.

And now, the links…

The Guardian long read looks at the new backlash against plastics, notably against the use and creation of plastic microbeads, which have quickly become pervasive in our environment.
Bloomberg investigates how 7-Eleven is using ICE raids to battle its own franchisees, with lawsuits in both directions, all in the wake of the guilty plea of a Long Island franchisee in 2013 to wire fraud, harboring illegal immigrants, and stealing parts of their wages.
Baltimore County used something called “exceptional clearance” to mark a statutory rape case as successfully closed despite failing to even charge the 29-year-old assailant, who went on to rape another underaged girl in Wisconsin. The practice is common across police departments nationwide.
The Cut has the strange story of “The Watcher,” a stalker who hounded a family out of a million-dollar New Jersey house by writing threatening letters. The writer hasn’t been caught, while some neighbors indulged in conspiracy theories that the victims wrote the letters themselves.
Kevin Alexander writes about the effect best-of lists can have on small restaurants after the burger joint he wrote was the best in the United States closed just five months after the list went up.
Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale has made it his mission to document all of the lies President Trump tells, amounting to thousands just since the vulgar talking yam took office. Dale writes in the Washington Post that fact-checking these lies is easy, since Trump tells the same lies over and over, and uses the same bad rhetorical devices when telling them. Dale also calls out U.S. news outlets for still falling for the same shit over and over again.
The terms of the subsidies Amazon will receive for its two new headquarters locations are out, and they’re quite generous given how profitable the company is. What I have not seen yet is an analysis of whether, say, New York City would be better off if they took the $1 billion in subsidies they’re giving amazon and plowed it into a less exciting investment like upgrading its subway system. Meanwhile, NYC gave amazon land that would have gone to affordable housing instead.
An L.A. musician concocted an elaborate scheme to schedule a European tour for his barely-real band, posing as a promoter, buying Facebook followers, and editing together concert footage to make it appear that his band was playing to big, raucous crowds.
A 19-year-old woman won election to the New Hampshire legislature this month, two years after an old, white, male legislator mocked her efforts to raise the minimum age for marriage in the state (which, I must add, Republicans keep blocking).
A 31-year-old speech therapist got so mad watching Betsy DeVos bumble through her confirmation hearings that she ran for the Superintendent of Schools job in Arizona as a Democrat – and won. She replaces Dingbat Diane Douglas, who wanted to introduce creationism into the public school science curriculum, and becomes the first Democrat in this job in over 25 years.
This month’s Blue Wave in the Midwest could mean a 2007 agreement for midwestern states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions gets a new lease on life.
Former naturopath Britt Hermes, who realized that naturopathy was bunk and blogs about bogus treatments in that field, won this year’s John Maddox Prize, given annually to one or two people for their efforts in standing up for science in the public sphere. She shared it with a researcher who documented the effects climate change and ocean acidification are having on coral reefs.
A new study found that eating less protein may improve the bacterial population of your gut, although the researchers caution that it’s just a single study and needs further confirmation. That said, most of us consume more protein than our body needs, and growing enough animal protein to feed the U.S. has deleterious effects on the environment.
The EPA refuses to enact a proposed ban on a dangerous paint remover that has killed more than 50 people over the last 40 years, but retailers are voluntarily choosing not to carry these products.
The BBC podcast The Inquiry asked how we messed up antibiotics as we head into a post-antibiotic future.
The Polish legislature rejected a “citizens’ bill” that would have abolished rules requiring schoolchildren to be vaccinated against infectious diseases, a bill that would have led to the deaths of hundreds of Polish kids had it passed. Warsaw is suffering from a measles outbreak due to foolish parents who skipped the MMR vaccine. Of course, major autism sites hailed the bill when it was introduced, despite mountains of studies showing no link between vaccines and autism.
Peter Hotez, author of the new book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, looks at the map of U.S. counties with the most kindergarteners who skipped vaccinations. The maps of states and counties he shows are interesting, but the county map tracks population a little too well – highlighted counties include the third, fourth, thirteenth, and fifteenth-most populous in the U.S.
Vice-President Mike Pence stood up for Burma’s Rohingya minority, condemning State Counsellor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to stop or oppose ethnic cleansing efforts by the military government against the Muslim minority.
MLB is butting heads with regional sports networks over the rights and payments around in-market streaming of live games, potentially bad news for baseball fans who just want to watch their home teams’ games and are willing to pay for that right.
Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods spoke to a Taiwan blog about the Taipei food scene.
Someone used fake social media accounts to give the impression of fan support for the Ottawa Senators in the wake of a controversy around players who were filmed mocking the team and its coach.
Tasty Minstrel games has a Kickstarter up for a reissue of Luna, a Stefan Feld game from 2010, in a new “deluxified” edition.
There’s also a Kickstarter for a new game based on the animated series Oddbods, aimed at kids 7 and up.
Finally, the tweet of the week is probably not a true story, but I want it to be:

OH MY GOD ?? pic.twitter.com/CHh24Xy13A

— Daniel Pryor ? (@DanielPryorr) November 16, 2018

Tagged arizona, boardgames, climate change, environment, frauds, links, longreads, new hampshire, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

October 27, 2018 · 6 comments

Stick to baseball, 10/27/18.

My most recent piece for ESPN+ subscribers wrapped up my Arizona Fall League stint, looking at 25 players from 13 organizations. I also had a free piece on ESPN with food, coffee, beer, and travel tips for Boston and Los Angeles leading into the World Series. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste looks at Nyctophobia, a one-versus-many game where most players play with blackout glasses. Only the villain can see the board; everyone else must play by touch and by talking to their teammates.

If, like Dave Gahan, you just can’t get enough, you can sign up for my free email newsletter, with more of my writing, appearing whenever the muse moves me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This 2013 essay by Adam Cayton-Holland on his sister’s suicide, his own grief, and trying to heal was the best piece I read this week.
Dinosaurs took over the world thanks to a massive climate change event that ended the Triassic period; within that period came the Carnian Pluvial Episode, a smaller climate catastrophe that opened the door for dinosaurs to rule, likely caused the eruption of oceanic volcanoes that pushed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and acidified the oceans … which should sound familiar.
GoodFundies looks at the history of media reports of the Wilpons’ meddling in baseball operations in a very, very long post that briefly mentions my comments on the Jeurys Familia trade fiasco. Shorter version: They’ve meddled so often, and so much to the team’s detriment, that you can see why so many candidates appear to have declined to interview.
In the wake of multiple revelations about Donald Trump’s businesses and his inheritance from his father, the New Yorker asks if fraud is simply embedded in Trump’s business model. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Why are some folks so threatened by transgender people? Because that threatens their beliefs that there are only two genders, while perhaps undermining the prejudiced person’s sense of self as a man or woman, according to some recent research on the subject.
The United States is withdrawing from the International Coffee Agreement, continuing this Administration’s policies of anti-globalization and protectionism, which will hurt American consumers and international coffee producers (including farmers who depend on export markets for their livelihoods).
The former Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions wrote a piece titled I Respected Scott Walker. Then I Worked for Him. in the Atlantic. It’s as damning as you’d expect: Walker pushed policies that would hurt middle and lower class Wisconsinites because he thought it would play well with the national party.
South Carolina is asking the Administration to allow ‘faith-based’ foster care agencies to discriminate against Jewish or other non-Christian parents who wish to foster children. This is theocracy in motion, in a state where more than 20% of residents identify as something other than Christian.
Alt-right trolls are very mad online over posters in New York City that are actually satirical street art, not official city posters. The artist in question, Winston Tseng, appears to have deleted his entire Internet presence in the last 48 hours – his Twitter account is gone, his Instagram is locked, his website has vanished.
Voting machines in Texas are changing some voters’ choices, either making their Senate choices blank or in some cases switching their vote from Beto O’Rourke (D) to Ted Cruz (R). The state agency overseeing the election has said it’s aware of the problem and is powerless to fix it.
ProPublica has reported on voter intimidation in Texas during early voting, such as “a partisan poll watcher looking over voter’s shoulders as they cast their ballots and questioning voters on their politics.” (That person was eventually removed from the property by police.) The ACLU has a guide on what to do if you face voter intimidation at the polls.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, the leader of the state’s attempt to subvert democracy, took off his hood this week when he said he was concerned about Georgians exercising their right to vote. In DeKalb County, nearly 5000 requests for absentee ballots were “lost” by county officials, according to a complaint by the local Democratic Party branch. Meanwhile, a local investigation found that Kemp owes over $800,000 in loans to a bank he helped create, but won’t answer any questions about the loans, such as the terms of the agreement.
Iowa Republican Steve King went full white nationalist in an interview with a far-right Austrian outlet, talking about his belief in the “Great Replacement,” where immigrants from Latin American and Asian countries will ‘replace’ white Americans (or Europeans) in their – “their” – home countries.
An Idaho-based white supremacist group is making racist robocalls to support Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, whose opponent, Andrew Gillum (D), is African-American.
And then there’s North Dakota, which is working like hell to disenfranchise Native American voters, as New York Times reporter Maggie Astor explains in this unrolled Twitter thread.
There’s been a lot of news and opinion about vaccine deniers this week. Endocrinologist Lubna Mirza writes that fear and misinformation drive non-vaccinators, and says that spreading such nonsense is “irresponsible, to say the least.” In Texas, a Republican backed by anti-vaccine nuts is running for House District 114; she’s also dropped some racist dog-whistles along the way, so if you live there, vote for John Turner, her Democratic challenger. The Republican candidate for Governor in Connecticut was caught on video saying of vaccinations that “We shouldn’t be dumping a lot of drugs into kids for no reason,” which is wrong on at least three points (vaccines aren’t drugs; they’re not being dumped; there’s a very good reason, preventing debilitating and often fatal diseases). That’s why Dr. David Gorski, also known as “Orac,” writes that the Republican Party has become the anti-vaccine party: Not all vaccine deniers are Republicans, but the Party has chosen to pander to anti-vaxxers on local, state, and national levels.
Physicist and prominent atheist writer Lawrence Krauss stands accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment and has agreed to resign at the end of the academic year. He’s denying the claims, although I find his rebuttal weak and that he fails to understand why what he’s accused of doing was wrong.
Microplastics are so pervasive in our environment that they’re showing up in our excrement.
Seattle’s minimum wage law has helped many workers but may have hindered new entrants to the labor market, according to a second study by the same authors whose paper a year ago implied that the law hurt workers on the whole. As with many economic policies, there are winners and losers, and the crux will be whether there are more of the former and if that outweighs the societal costs paid by the latter.
A Guardian essay asks if reading is really helpful for depression. I am fortunate in that, while I’ve felt the black dog on my shoulder, I have never been so depressed that I felt unable or unwilling to read.
Hawai’i got a bit smaller this week as a hurricane washed tiny East Island off the map, a potential disaster for sea turtles that nested on the 11-acre island.
The white man who killed two black people in a Louisville Kroger’s has a schizoaffective disorder and had previously lost his right to own firearms due to previous violent incidents.
A city commissioner in Lakeland, Florida, who shot and killed a shoplifter in his store, has been charged with murder after his ‘stand your ground’ claim was rejected. That’s nice to hear, but if ‘stand your ground’ convinced the killer to pull the trigger, then the problem with the law remains.
Starling Games, the publishers of Everdell, have a new Kickstarter up for Anomaly, the second game from designer Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance.
Finally, the Tweet of the Week:

FOUNDING FATHER: we must always have an electoral college and 2 senators per state

ME: ok but what if 40 million people live in california

FOUNDING FATHER (spits out tea prepared by a slave): there’s HOW many people in WHAT

— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) October 22, 2018

Tagged baseball, climate change, coffee, Economics, environment, florida, guns, links, mental health, mental illness, metoo, north dakota, racism, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, voter suppression, wisconsin

October 20, 2018 · 11 comments

Stick to baseball, 10/20/18.

My first dispatch from the Arizona Fall League went up for ESPN+ subscribers this week, covering Forrest Whitley, Vlad Guerrero Jr., Julio Pablo Martinez, and more. I’ll file another, likely longer report this weekend.

My latest board game review for Paste covers the Spiel des Jahres-nominated cooperative game The Mind, where all players have to try to play all their hand cards to the table in ascending order – but without communicating with each other at all.

I’ll be at the Manheim Library in Manheim, PA, on Monday, October 22nd, to talk about Smart Baseball and sign copies of the book (which will be available for purchase there too).

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday night. If you don’t get it, you don’t know what you’re missing.

And now, the links…

The most important read of the week is the late Jamal Khashoggi’s final column for the Washington Post, on the need for more freedom of expression in the Arab world. He was killed by Saudi intelligence agents shortly after writing it.
Longreads (and longish reads): Graduate student Urmila Mahadev appears to have solved the verification problem in quantum computing, a major unsolved problem in the theoretical field where researchers lacked a method of knowing if a quantum computer had actually carried our your instructions.
Evangelical writer Jen Hatmaker has built a following through her books and popular blog on her faith and family. Her recent turn into political writing, on how Trump and his supporters are acting contrary to Christian beliefs and teachings, has earned her both praise and vitriol, including death threats.
Popular Mechanics spoke to nine scientists running for Congress this year across the country.
This obituary of a 30-year-old woman who died as a result of an opiate addiction, written by her parents, is crushing, and a good reminder of the humanity of people who fall prey to this increasingly common disease.
The two surviving members of the Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz, have a new book coming out on the band’s history; Vulture has an excerpt on the mis-marketing of Paul’s Boutique.
CityLab examines why public transit works better outside the United States and tackles a few common myths. Most interesting to me: The example of Toronto’s supra-municipal authority considering the needs of the city and the suburbs when building mass transit, and the examples of European cities building bus or metro stations first and developing urban and suburban areas around them. Also, Nashville: WTF?
Sears filed for bankruptcy after its hedge-fund investor owner bled the company of most of its valuable assets, and his recovery plan signals that he’d like to continue to do so.
The Republican Party is coming after Social Security and Medicare as they try to solve the budget deficit, a crisis utterly of their own making due to tax cuts and military spending.
Racism drove white voters to switch to Trump, not economic anxiety. Try not to have a heart attack and die from not surprise.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke failed to disclose his partial ownership of a weapons manufacturer, which creates several conflicts of interest with policy areas of his day job. You’d think that would get him removed from his post, but in this Administration, it’s just his way of fitting in.
Nevada Sen. Dean Heller (guess) pushed the VA to use an unproven and likely fraudulent ‘brain wave’ treatment for PTSD sufferers, because the company offering it has a connection to one of his senior aides.
Virginia Rep. Dave Brat (guess) told a recovering addict that he understood the latter’s troubles because he’s been targeted by negative campaign ads by his opponent. Totally the same thing.
Someone stole a Seattle homeless woman’s car, which was her only shelter at the time, after which it was found and towed. The towing company refused to return it to her, then sold it for $175, then bought it back on a judge’s order but charged her for storing it. She finally got it back after a year of fighting, although the towing company – which is the official towing company of the city of Seattle – claims she owes them over $21,000 in fees.
The conservative Weekly Standard asks why Iowans keep returning white nationalist Steve King to Congress. The Des Moines Register endorsed Democratic candidates across the state, arguing that Republicans have failed in their opportunities at the helms of our federal and state governments while obstructing attempts to stop corruption and collusion with foreign powers.
Coloradans concerned about the deleterious environmental effects of fracking should vote yes on Proposition 112, which would require a buffer zone between fracking sites and schools or water sources like underground aquifers. John Elway recorded a vague TV ad for the oil & gas companies fighting it.
Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital have recommended 31 papers co-authored by a former lab director be retracted because he fabricated or falsified data.
Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism has led to a twenty-year decline in vaccination rates, won this year’s Rusty Razor award for bad science. Indeed, the percentage of toddlers in the U.S. who have received zero vaccinations keeps rising.
The state of Arizona had to cancel a parent vaccination education course after negative feedback from about 120 parents, many of whom admitted they hadn’t even seen the course information. Vaccination levels are especially low among Arizona kindergarteners, to the point that the state’s schoolchildren are below herd immunity levels.
A pair of low-level Republican Party employees in Arizona tried to donate to state Democrats in the name of a fictional Communist party.
They’re not the only terrible people in the Arizona Republican Party: Debbie Lesko, who won a special election to replace Trent Franks in the House of Representatives this spring, is flat-out lying about her opponent, Dr. Hiral Tipirneni, in a new campaign ad. Lesko’s district includes a lot of retirees, who ought to be concerned about the GOP’s plans (mentioned above) to cut Social Security and Medicare.
A group of 21 Democratic lawmakers wants to know why the Administration is cozying up to the neo-Nazi government of Hungary, including cancelling a planned grant to support independent media in the former Soviet bloc nation, which has lurched to the right by electing an openly anti-Semitic leader.
Voter suppression in Georgia got more literal this week as county officials ordered 40 black senior citizens off a bus taking them to vote. Meanwhile, a Salon examination found that Secretary of State and current GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp has purged over 300,000 registered voters from Georgia’s rolls.
Kansas, seeing Georgia’s moves, said “hold my beer” and moved the lone polling station in Dodge City, which is 60% Latino to a location outside the city limits. It’s really amazing that I, a white American who has always lived in majority-white areas, have never had any difficulty finding a place to cast my ballots. So weird.
CAP Action found that Florida’s murder rate jumped after the state enacted a so-called ‘Stand Your Ground’ law in 2005.
A new study examines how easy it is to vote in all 50 states, with a ranking from 1 to 50. Oregon is first (easiest), while Mississippi, about 20 seconds removed from blowing up black churches, is 50th. I was most surprised to see three states in the Great Lakes region – Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio – all ranked in the 40s.
The Houston Chronicle endorsed Beto O’Rourke for Senate, saying his opponent, incumbent Ted Cruz, has shown “little interest in addressing the needs of his fellow Texans during his six years in office” while calling out Cruz’s unwillingness to serve as a check on the powers of the President.
Nature says that the biggest risk for a global pandemic comes from misinformation spread by denialists, such as “anti-vaxxers” and charlatans like Wakefield and others selling supplements to those made afraid of conventional medicine.
A reader sent along this link on the best new pizzerias in the state of New Jersey, some of which I will try to hit this winter.

Tagged arizona, environment, frauds, guns, hip-hop, iowa, kansas, links, physics, rap, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, virginia, voter suppression

September 29, 2018 · 2 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/29/18.

My awards ballots for the six major postseason player honors went up this week for ESPN+ subscribers, and I held a Klawchat Thursday to discuss them.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Reiner Knizia’s Blue Lagoon, a light/midweight game that plays very quickly but adds some strategy with complex scoring, and has a cover that might remind you of a certain Disney movie.

And now, the links…

Long reads first: This Politico piece on on the rise, fall, and change of heart of former hard-right Iowa state rep Kent Sorensen is the best thing I read this week. It speaks once again to the power of exposing bigots to the very people they profess to hate.
A Boston University doctor and researcher has made a career of testifying that cases of suspected child abuse are actually rare genetic disorders or vitamin deficiencies; in over ten years he’s never examined an abuse case and determined it was the result of actual abuse. This ProPublica piece highlights inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his statements, and details a case where Holick’s testimony resulted in a baby going back to an abusive parent who subsequently put her back in the hospital with a broken leg and bleeding in the brain. Why BU employs a child abuse enabler, or courts and juries find him credible, is not explained.
A UPenn professor and director of that school’s Annenberg Public Policy Center argues that Russian interference online gave Donald Trump the 2016 election – but she bases her assertion on data, not conjecture, laying out the case in greater length in her upcoming book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President.
The Daily Beast looked at Barstool Sports’ history of bullying opponents and encouraging sexual harassment. Founder Dave Portnoy often doxxes critics, such as posting this piece’s author’s phone number on Twitter, a clear violation of their ToS, but was never suspended for doing so.
Methane trapped in Arctic ice is starting to leak out as the climate warms. A similar event at the end of the Triassic era warmed the planet so much it led to a mass extinction event that wiped out 76% of all species on earth.
I’ve written before here about how trauma affects the brain, including my review of the seminal book The Body Keeps the Score. In the wake of multiple women stating that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted them, NPR talked to scientists about how trauma affects memory, something that everyone should be taught in schools. We tend to think of memories the way we think of data storage – that we record the information, accurately, and have it there to be recalled when we run the appropriate mental script – but memories are fallible and malleable, with trauma a major reason why our memories of significant events are often wrong or incomplete.
Arizona Senator Jeff Flake asked for a vote delay after previously signaling his support for the nominee, and the link there implies it was the result of assault victims confronting him in an elevator just hours before his announcement. I’d like to think this is true, and that Flake, who says lots of good things and then does nothing to back them up, has decided to take a stand, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
This Twitter thread from a researcher who studies sexual violence includes information, with links to published research, on why we should believe women, including Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who allege they’ve been assaulted.
Padma Lakshmi explained why she didn’t report her rape at age 16 in the NY Times.
ThinkProgress’ Lindsay Gibbs writes about Dr. Ford’s bravery, and watching the hearings as a sexual assault survivor herself.
We excuse young men who assault women because they’re young and their brains are still developing and we don’t want to ruin their lives. We excuse older men who’ve done it because that’s all in the past and they’ve changed since then, of course. Where in this framework do women matter?
America’s crumbling social infrastructure of libraries, schools, playgrounds, and fields is is hurting our democracy, writes sociologist Eric Klinenberg for The Atlantic.
In Texas, a state where most politicians think The Handmaid’s Tale is a utopian novel, the state’s attorney general is supporting a school district that expelled a student for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance, a clear violation of the student’s First Amendment rights, in a case of blatant pandering for votes before November.
Professor of English and Cultural History Joe Moran writes in the Guardian about the difficult of writing a ‘perfect’ sentence, or even deciding what a perfect sentence is.
A new book called Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity argues that there have always been anti-vaxxers, according to this NPR interview with author Michael Kinch.
ProPublica also looks at the so-called “Jobs Alliance” in West Virginia where a coal baron is trying to block natural gas expansion that would actually help a growing industry with a viable future.
A Trump Administration analysis concluded that the planet will warm by 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 so climate change regulations are pointless, bringing a whole new level of cynicism to public discourse.
Trump’s EPA immediately rolled back rules on coal plant pollution into waterways, raising the risk of heavy metal pollution during flooding like that caused by Hurricane Florence.
This long-ish excerpt from Michael Lewis’ upcoming book The Fifth Risk covers the tragicomic inside of Trump’s transition team and shows him as a man who didn’t believe he had any chance to be President.
One new board game Kickstarter of note – Fabio Lopiano’s Ragusa, co-published by Capstone Games, a company that focuses on heavy Euro titles it can translate and import to the U.S.

Tagged climate change, environment, first amendment, kavanaugh, links, mental illness, metoo, russia, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trauma, vaccines, west virginia

September 15, 2018 · 26 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/15/18.

My one ESPN+/Insider piece this week named my Prospect of the Year for 2018, with a number of other players who were worthy of the title but couldn’t unseat the incumbent. I answered questions on that and other topics in a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Disney’s Villainous, a card game that resembles deckbuilders (like Dominion) in mechanics, but gives you your entire deck at the start of the game. Each player plays as a specific villain, with a unique deck and victory conditions, so you learn each deck’s intricacies as you play.

And now, the links…

The best thing you’ll read this week is my friend Anthony del Broccolo’s letter to his late wife, who died unexpectedly in childbirth in June.
Now some longreads: Bleacher Report’s Mina Fader looks at whether concussions from playing football contributed to a 13-year-old’s suicide.
One of Osama bin Laden’s goals was to mire the west in endless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East. The Nation‘s Tom Engelhardt argues that we have given bin Laden his wish.
The use of WhatsApp to spread false rumors led to five killings of innocent men in India when those stories told users that there were child murderers on the loose.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks is women’s sport in ‘trouble’ as the divide between men’s and women’s sports becomes blurred by scientific advances showing that the split isn’t binary. The podcast rather deftly considers the science of intersex individuals and testosterone production as well as the moral and philosophical questions of fairness and identity, and the ethics of so-called ‘sex verification.’ Castor Semenya, who appears in a new Nike ad just released last month, appears prominently in these discussions, as the IAAF has introduced rule changes that seem to specifically target her.
The New York Review of Books chose to run a self-exonerating essay by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian commentator who has been accused by more than 20 women of sexually assaulting and/or physically abusing them. Their editor spoke to Slate about the decision and, in my opinion, absolutely embarrassed himself in the process.
Matthew Desmond, author of the incredible Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, writes in the New York Times that Americans’ belief that jobs are the solution to poverty is wrong. There are structural obstacles to escaping poverty that we must address at the state and federal levels.
Economist Andrew Zimbalist was a longtime opponent of public funding for sports stadiums, but he changed his tune when he was paid $225 an hour by the city of Worcester for its funding efforts for a stadium to house the Pawtucket Red Sox.
I reviewed Maryn McKenna’s new book Big Chicken in July, and she wrote on the same topic – the connection between factory-farming of chickens and the rise of antibiotic resistance – in a long read for WIRED.
Probiotic products – those containing bacteria believed to be beneficial to our digestive systems – are everywhere in the supermarket, the drugstore, the health food store, and more, but they’re probably useless when it comes to boosting your microbiome.
Salon/Rolling Stone looks at how Jimmy Page assembled the original Led Zeppelin lineup.
The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky asks why Sen. Dianne Feinstein sat on the Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations for two months.
Brian Buelter writes that Kavanaugh’s repeated attempts to mislead Congress, now and in the early 2000s, are reason enough to reject his nomination.
The Wall Street Journal keeps misreporting the facts and research on gender dysphoria.
Arizona lawmaker Eddie Farnsworth (guess which party) is about to land a $30 million windfall thanks to a state board of education ruling allowing him to profit off converting his state-funded charter schools to nonprofit status. He’s running for the state Senate this November, and I guess he’ll have lots of cash for more campaign ads now.
The Guardian looks at how the Koch Brothers support laws like Arizona’s as part of their effort to undermine public education across the country.
South Carolina did not evacuate prisons in the path of Hurricane Florence, and you can draw your own conclusions why.
The mayor of a South Carolina town just outside of the state capital of Columbia posted anti-Islam memes and comments on Facebook, but then he met Muslim residents of his town and changed his views. Nothing beats intolerance and bigotry like exposure to members of the targeted groups.
A Texas school district is pushing ‘Judeo-Christian values’ in a new curriculum that omits Hillary Clinton but remembers the Alamo. I doubt any single-year curriculum could ever satisfy everyone on what is included or excluded, but no public school district should be pushing religious values in its classrooms.
The Rio Grande, America’s second-longest river, is drying up, and nobody is doing a whole lot to protect it.
Facebook’s “fact-checking” protocols led a right-wing outlet to censor content from ThinkProgress.
Iowa’s favorite white nationalist Congressperson Steve King once again retweeted something from another white nationalist.
The Fix, a site dedicated to stories of addiction and recovery, interviewed comedian and former radio host Jake Fogelnest about his 12 years of sobriety.
The Athletic has a subscriber-only piece on Dustin Ackley, the #2 pick in the 2009 draft whose career may be over at age 30, with some great comments from Ackley on his own raging against the dying of the baseball light. If this is it for Ackley, who was the consensus #2 prospect in the draft after Stephen Strasburg, he’ll probably end up outside of the top 30 players in that draft class by WAR – he’s at #26 now and I see several guys behind him who will probably pass him within five years.
If you have the dungeon-crawl board game Clank! In Space!, the Apocalypse! Expansion is now available at retail.
Asmodee Digital announced they’re porting several popular board game adaptations to Nintendo Switch, including Catan, Carcassonne, and Pandemic.

Tagged addiction, arizona, baseball, boardgames, cte, environment, gender issues, health, iowa, links, metoo, science, south carolina, stick to baseball, texas

August 25, 2018 · 16 comments

Stick to baseball, 8/25/18.

I had one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week, scouting notes on Tampa wunderkind Wander Franco and some Yankees & Rangers prospects, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the gladiator-themed deckbuilding game Carthage for Paste this week. That’s the last of my pre-Gen Con reviews; I believe everything I review the rest of the year will either be from games I got/saw at Gen Con or that were released afterwards.

I’m about due for a fresh edition of my free email newsletter, to which you may wish to subscribe if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ESPN’s Jackie McMullen has an excellent piece on the NBA’s progressive efforts to help players battle mental health issues, interspersed with insights from Kevin Love, Paul Pierce, and other players who’ve dealt with anxiety, depression, and panic disorder.
The Guardian looks at TripAdvisor at a crossroads, beset by fake reviews and dealing with many of the same questions of responsibility for content that affect larger tech outfits.
Ten billion dollars a year goes to ‘charities’ who aim to shape public policy, which can both alter public discussion and political votes on topics while also depriving the U.S. Treasury of tax revenue from the associated income. That’s just one revelation in Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece on the new era of philanthropy, where the wealthy have more power than ever and often wield it through their foundations.
Radiolab looked at Facebook’s own problems with regulating hate speech in a recent podcast episode that I found very thorough – it doesn’t let Facebook off the hook, but does a solid job of explaining some of the difficulties they face in making decisions on what content to allow and what to delete.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks if we might see another AIDS pandemic as global health initiatives slow and major aid donors (notably the U.S.) reduce their funding. If our government continues its lurch towards theocracy, you can bet AIDS research and international aid for AIDS treatment will drop.
Russian trolls/bots may have been spreading vaccine denialist views on social media, although Dr. David “Orac” Gorski argues that the media coverage has overstated its prevalence.
Orac was busy this week, with another post on how the Australian edition of 60 Minutes ran a puff piece on a quack stem cell clinic. So-called stem cell therapy has become the next big thing in separating gullible or desperate patients from their money, but the science itself is unproven and very much in its infancy.
Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith writes in the conservative Weekly Standard that there is sufficient grounds for impeachment, and that may lead Trump to try to fire Mueller and any other investigators working on the collusion case.
How do microscopic plastic particles end up in our food chain? Researchers have found so-called microplastics in water supplies, in beer, and even in aquatic creatures we consume, with unknown consequences for the ecosystem and our bodies.
The multi-level marketing scheme known as Herbalife has been around, and been accused of being a scam, for decades now, but somehow they always skate by. (They’re a major sponsor of the LA Galaxy soccer team, and as good an argument as you’ll see for not putting corporate sponsor names on jerseys.) A new lawsuit alleges that Herbalife’s system of paid seminars misleads attendees by promising wealth while siphoning off their money.
Uganda, one of the few African countries where baseball has a presence, may be about to descend into chaos as a popular singer turned rising opposition politician has been jailed and beaten by agents of dictator Yoweri Museveni. Protests against the detention and Museveni’s oppressive rule continue to grow.
Corruption in Louisiana: The state’s Senate President, John Alario, has twice spiked a bill legalizing ride-sharing services to help his friend, who sells insurance to cab companies. This story appeared on ProPublica two days ago; it hasn’t been picked up by any local Louisiana news outlet since.
New EPA rules, relaxing regulations on clean, beautiful coal, will lead to 1400 more deaths per year and up to 15,000 additional cases of respiratory problems, including asthma, due to the fine particulate matter emitted by coal mining and production.
Brooklyn-based pizzaiolo Paulie Gee has been talking about opening a New York-style slice shop for years now, but it appears it will finally open at Franklin & Noble this month.
N.K. Jemisin won her third straight Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Stone Sky, and her five-minute acceptance speech is well worth your time, as it’s by turns funny and inspiring.
My Twitter friend Parker Molloy wrote for the Guardian how she can’t root for the Cubs after their decision to acquire Daniel Murphy, who has expressed anti-gay views without ever retracting or revising them.
Asia Argento, a prominent victim of Harvey Weinstein’s predations, now stands accused herself of statutory rape of a 17-year-old boy; we can believe her claims on Weinstein but still hold her accountable for her own transgressions.
Kelli Ward is running for Jeff Flake’s Senate seat in Arizona on a platform of pro-Trump, white nationalist talking points; she’s even been campaigning with Weird Mike Cernovich, the conspiracy theorist who gained an audience by pushing the bullshit Pizzagate story.
Blake Fahrenthold resigned from Congress over a sexual harassment scandal that U.S. taxpayers helped clear up for him, but blames everyone except himself for his career’s demise.
Georgia’s GOP is trying to suppress the black vote in November by closing polling stations, using the Americans with Disabilities Act as its justification. Majority-black Randolph County did reverse its plans to close seven of nine polling stations after the public outcry. If you live in Georgia, make sure your elected officials know you support voting rights and oppose any attempts to suppress the vote. And voters in other areas should know this is part of a broader, national vote-suppression effort using the same flanking maneuver.
The Washington Post‘s Elizabeth Bruenig argues that it’s time to stop thinking of ‘socialism’ as a dirty word in a piece that argues largely for ‘democratic socialism,’ which is a poorly-named platform of social welfare policies that by and large doesn’t actually require socialism. Socialism has a specific historical meaning: government ownership of major means of production and distribution. It’s been tried all over the world, and it has failed, as it wipes out many of the incentives that drive human decisions in the marketplace. If you want to argue for a stronger social safety net and for policies that strive to reduce structural discrimination and inequality, that’s a debate worth having, but it’s not ‘socialism.’
The New Republic‘s Sarah Jones writes (in a piece from April) that the real campus free speech problem is on the right, not on the left, highlighting cases of punishment for views handed down by evangelical Christian colleges.
A Kansas City TV station suspended a reporter for sharing an article on white privilege on her Facebook page. The incident may also have led to her termination; a KC Star editorial argues that the station was in the wrong. The reporter’s lawsuit against KSHB is still pending.
Amazon appears to have set up a slew of astroturfing Twitter accounts to fight news coverage of poor working conditions at its warehouses.
Researchers at MIT and Harvard have developed a genome test that may help identify patients at greater risk for diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, and a few other common, often deadly diseases.
The longstanding hypothesis on the cause of age-related cognitive decline has been neuron death and insufficient replacement of those cells to make up for the loss. New research may counter that, showing that the cause might be lost neuron plasticity, which was reversed in mice using the drug fluoxetine, better known as Prozac.
Hua Hsu writes in the New Yorker about the ‘end point’ of representation and the hit film Crazy Rich Asians, the success of which has brought the term representation (back) into the mainstream conversation. Representation matters to the people who haven’t been represented, and if that inconveniences you as someone who has never had to think twice about seeing people who look and sound like you on the big or small screens, well, tough.
Red Raven Games has a Kickstarter running for the second edition of their game The Ancient World.

Tagged africa, arizona, charity, environment, hugo award, links, medicine, pizza, pseudoscience, representation, science fiction, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression

August 18, 2018 · 19 comments

Stick to baseball, 8/18/18.

My biggest piece this week was my annual Gen Con wrap-up for Paste, covering the 20 best games I got to play, demo, or just watch at the convention, and discussing pretty much everything else I saw too.

For Insiders, I wrote up what Shane Baz’s inclusion means for the Chris Archer trade, with scouting notes on Adam Haseley, Nolan Jones, and some pitching prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. Feel free to sign up for more of my ramblings, plus links to all of my content.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times profiles the privacy activists who fought Google, Facebook, & other tech giants over how they used customers’ data.
This research paper from May finds that hospitals’ leverage results in large price swings (PDF) even across “undifferentiated” services between different facilities, one possible contributor to the rising cost of health care that any reform proposal will need to address. Directing patients to lower-cost providers for such basic services could save patients and insurers a significant amount of money.
Food writer Michael Twitty visits his ancestral homeland of Ghana for the first time, in the company of four African-American chefs, to eat traditional Ghanaian food and reconnect with his roots.
Dan Gillmoor, director of the Knight Center at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, calls on all journalists to work together to defend the freedom of the press and expose the degradation of key cultural norms that underpin our society, including voting rights, free speech, and opposition to corruption.
Dr. David Glosser, the uncle of White House policy adviser and xenophobic reactionary Stephen Miller, argues that Miller’s anti-immigration stance is ‘hypocritical’ because Miller wouldn’t be in the U.S. were it not for the same immigration laws Miller is trying to roll back. That’s not a perfect argument – I don’t think it makes Miller a hypocrite for arguing for tighter borders, but it makes his beliefs about the borders inconsistent with his own history.
The Philadelphia Citizen and its partners launched a series of related pieces on the high cost of being ‘broke’ in Philadelphia. For example, WHYY looks at how the cost and limitations of public transit reduce job options for poor Philadelphians.
At the Athletic, Melissa Lockard wrote about her husband’s passing this month at age 41 of a rare cancer. The piece is free for all readers, and is every bit as gutting as you’d expect.
This Royals Review post’s title makes it sound like a mere hit job on the team, but “It is possible that the Royals do not understand how numbers work” makes a smart, broader point that the team’s fealty towards Alcides Escobar is irrational based strictly on the math, without involving emotions at all.
Our jury system is not well built to adjudicate questions of science, a fact demonstrated yet again when a jury decided in favor of a man who claimed Monsanto’s Roundup gave him cancer. The main problem here is that you can pretty much never say what caused someone’s cancer; we can make educated guesses, of course, but cancer is aberrant cell division, and can happen without any apparent external cause.
Then the Environmental Working Group (EWG) opportunistically put out a press release claiming that they found excessive quantities of glyphosate (Roundup) in breakfast cereals, without putting their claims through peer review or explaining why they used a standard of 1/10,000th that of the EPA tolerance for glyphosate. Slate explained why the EWG piece and credulous media reports on it are all bunkum.
An ongoing measles epidemic has sickened over 100 people in 21 states already. And if people try to tell you measles isn’t that bad, ask them if they know about the fatal brain-wasting complication that shows up ten years later.
An 11-month-old boy had a stroke from catching the chicken pox from unvaccinated older siblings. (He was too young for the vaccination.) I don’t understand how this isn’t child neglect. The boy will likely have permanent neurological damage and is at increased risk of another cerebrovascular incident.
I linked to the #MeToo stories on Four Barrel Coffee over the winter, when the scandal first broke. Eight months later, the business is recovering but the owners haven’t divested to employees as they promised. Their reasons aren’t invalid, but when you state to the public and to your workers that you’re going to do something, failing to do so is a serious abdication of responsibility.
This New York Times story asks what happens to #MeToo when the harasser is a feminist professor? The answer, entirely predictably, is that other academics closed ranks around her, rather than believing her accuser.
Neo-Confederates – Christ, how is this even a thing – are now openly courting Russian assistance, which has to be a joke, not that I think these people are smart enough to punk the mainstream media, but white supremacists making friends with our main geopolitical adversary, today and from the last 70 years, is too ridiculous to be real. Of course, these neo-Nazi types ain’t the brightest bulbs.
First We Feast’s Hot Ones videos can be kind of amusing for the guests’ reactions to the spiciest hot sauces they consume as the interview nears its end, but most of the time, that’s been the only appeal for me. Their latest episode with Michael Cera is the best pure interview I’ve seen from the show – and he takes the million-Scoville hot sauce like a damn veteran.
KUOW looks at how Ohio used technology to help clear its rape kit backlog and asks why other states, like Washington, aren’t doing the same.
West Virginia’s Republican Party just pulled an end run around voters to pack its Supreme Court before this fall’s elections.
Joe Scarborough asks why the GOP has abnegated its responsibilities on Russia despite clear evidence that the country interfered in our elections and continues to do so, even trying to stop ongoing investigations into Russia’s efforts.
Georgia leaders are trying to close polling places in heavily Democractic precincts, citing ADA requirements to justify their attempts at voter suppression. The ACLU is fighting it, but the real problem is the 2013 Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated key parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
BuzzFeed profiled Parkland shooting survivor Jaclyn Corin, who is less famous than some of her classmates but is more instrumental in organizing the students’ movement for greater gun control.
Entertainment Weekly interviewed Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar on LGBTQ representation in animation and children’s series.
I’m not sure if this Vox piece on why adults find it hard to make and maintain friendships is all that accurate, but its points, especially about being a reliable friend, are worth considering.
Board games: If you’re familiar with the very fun One Night Ultimate Werewolf – which, I recently discovered, my six-year-old niece is shockingly good at playing – there’s a spinoff title, One Night Ultimate Super Villains, on Kickstarter now. It’s a little more kid-oriented in theme and language.
Starling Games has a Kickstarter going for a new expansion to its Alien Frontiers game.

Tagged africa, baseball, boardgames, environment, first amendment, health, links, privacy, stick to baseball, vaccines

August 11, 2018 · 8 comments

Stick to baseball, 8/11/18.

Just one Insider post this week, with scouting notes on some Yankees, Pirates, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My Gen Con wrap-up is filed to Paste and I’ll update this post with the link when I get it.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter, which I’ve been sending out every ten days or so. And my book, Smart Baseball, is now just $9 on Kindle.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Eater exposes the toxic workplace culture at Estela and other restaurants operated by chef Thomas Carter.
ProPublica exposes the unelected officials who are running the VA from the shadows of Mar-a-Lago.
Dale Murphy, former Atlanta Braves superstar and near-Hall of Famer, wrote the best piece I have seen to date on players’ social media gaffes, such as the extremely bigoted tweets from Josh Hader and Trea Turner. Murphy gets it, and speaks with the gravitas folks like me simply can’t muster. Over at Medium, Justin Megahan asked about the baseball culture that produces young men who think this shit is funny, although I think it’s not specific to baseball, but a function of societal views of masculinity.
A major investigation by liberal rag … um Forbes found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross may have stolen over $120 million from investors, and lied about his assets and business activities on ethics disclosure forms when he was nominated. He’s still employed as of Saturday afternoon. Drain the swamp, indeed.
Twitter’s attempt to remain apolitical by refusing to ban conspiracy theorist and snake oil salesman Alex Jones is in itself a political choice. Parker Malloy writes here that Twitter still can’t figure out what kind of platform it wants to be; I don’t like the platform it has become.
WIRED‘s Issie Lapowsky writes that tech companies can’t win their war against Jones. That may be true, but doesn’t excuse inaction.
Also writing for WIRED, Clive Thompson offers thoughts on how to slow the spread of online hate. Doing nothing or disengaging are not good options.
Slate examines four hypotheses on why Twitter hasn’t moved against Jones yet, none of which is terribly satisfying.
Laura Ingraham went full white nationalist on Fox News this week; the Atlantic called her out on it, both in that her love of “country” seems to ignore this country’s founding principles, and that the population as a whole doesn’t agree with her.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the darling of the progressive left, but her increased media presence has just led to her producing a lot of bullshit answers, including the same kind of myth-repeating that characterizes the alt-right. Her policy proposals are at least interesting enough to discuss, but her sound bytes don’t reveal any depth to her ideas.
The Italian Senate is trying to delay the country’s new mandatory vaccination rules that arose in response to an ongoing measles epidemic in the supposedly developed country.
I’ve never had any use for PETA, and they reminded me why when they attacked Impossible Foods for testing its burgers on rats to satisfy federal safety requirements. If PETA’s interest is in improving the lives and welfare of animals … well, it’s not, as evidenced here. Their interest is in generating headlines. I guess they got their wish.
A couple in New Mexico appear to have stolen a $100 million painting just to keep it in their apartment, and perhaps stolen and sold other art works to finance a lifestyle beyond their apparent means. None of this was discovered until after their deaths, and family members still can’t believe it’s true.
The FDA has approved the first new malarial preventive drug in over 18 years.
One of my Senators, Tom Carper, wrote an editorial assailing the Trump administration’s plans to end emissions standards for cars. It’s going to take years to undo the environmental damage wrought by this regime.
Attorney General Jeff helped block an EPA action against Drummond Coal, one of his biggest donors, while he was still in the Senate, according to testimony in a recent bribery trial of a Drummond executive and a prominent Alabama law firm, both of whom had close ties to .
The sugar industry in Florida is under attack now for its role in pollution that is feeding toxic algae blooms; they’ve also got a long history of labor rights abuses and using tariffs to restrict sugar imports and raise consumer prices. The Florida GOP has historical ties to Big Sugar, and one leading gubernatorial candidate, Adam Putnam, has taken over $8 million in contributions from Big Sugar and its PACS.
Mike Salk, program director for ESPN Seattle 710 and longtime host of the Brock & Salk show, as well as a friend of mine, wrote about how Jim Abbott helped inspire him after an accident damaged his hand at age 12.
The online editorial comics site The Nib has a Kickstarter for them to start a print version of the publication. Some of the best editorial cartoonists online have appeared in the Nib or will appear in the magazine, including Matt “We Should Improve Society Somewhat” Bors.

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