frauds — Page 4

→ July 22, 2019
→ By keith

Billion Dollar Whale.

When I reviewed Bad Blood a few months ago, one of you recommended Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s book Billion Dollar Whale, since it’s in a similar vein – another story about a con artist who took very wealthy people for a substantial ride. While Elizabeth Holmes got caught, and may even stand trial next year (although I hold out little hope of serious punishment), Jho Low, the “whale” at the heart of this book, remains a fugitive from justice, and still has a lot of the proceeds of his massive scam – maybe the biggest in world history.

Low was a Malaysian nobody with a little bit of family money who somehow talked his way into the good graces of Malaysian President Najib Razak and some of his myrmidons, and thus ended up in control of a new sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia called 1MDB. Low, with the help of other officials in Malaysia and co-conspirators in the United Arab Emirates, managed to loot the fund of several billion dollars, using the proceeds to party his way around the world, but also to invest in or start legitimate businesses. He invested in EMI Music, bought real estate in the United States and the United Kingdom, and even funded a Hollywood production company called Red Granite Pictures, co-founded by the stepson of President Razak, which produced the Oscar-nominated film The Wolf of Wall Street as well as Daddy’s Home and Dumb and Dumber To. Meanwhile, Low kept his position of power by providing Razak’s wife with millions of dollars in gifts and jewelry, while using state funds to drum up support to keep Razak in office. He did all of this with the help of major western investment banks, notably Goldman Sachs, which profited handsomely from Low’s looting of the Malaysian government’s supposed investment fund, as well as a Swiss bank called BSI.

Wright and Hope spin an unbelievable yarn here, going from Low’s childhood to his years at Wharton, where he already showed the sort of pretension and penchant for not paying his debts, through his rise and partial fall as the de facto leader of 1MDB. Low befriended Leonardo DiCaprio, giving him millions of dollars of art as gifts, and dated supermodel Miranda Kerr, giving her $8 million in jewelry. (DiCaprio and Kerr forfeited all of those gifts, voluntarily, once the FBI began its investigation into 1MDB.) He also hung out with Jamie Foxx and producer Swizz Beatz, the husband of singer & musician Alicia Keys; Swizz Beatz in particular continued to support Low even when it was clear that the latter had come by all his money via fraud.

Low’s con was really simple as cons go – he covered up his pilfering of the till with a series of paper transactions, doing so with the cooperation of other con men in Malaysia’s government and with the sovereign funds of Arab nations, all of whom took payouts to participate in the scam. What is hard to fathom, and what Wright and Hope spell out so well, is how thoroughly Low et al bamboozled western banks and accounting firms – or how little they cared about the provenance of the funds as long as they were getting paid. Billion Dollar Whale could be a textbook in a class on “Know Your Customer” rules, and what happens when banks fail to follow those procedures. Low skated repeatedly at points when someone should have told him no, simply because he could get someone else to forge a letter to support him.

Wright and Hope try to explain some of Low’s personality and choice to go into a life of fraud, but largely end up stymied by how bland he was – socially awkward and introverted, granted access to famous people and women by his money but still every bit as inscrutable. He also studiously avoided attention throughout his tenure with 1MDB, so there was minimal press coverage of him, and he didn’t start to appear in the media coverage of the scandal until after several stories had already appeared. So it’s not a biography of Low in any sense, but a story of a con – a completely fascinating one because of how many people either went along with it (to get rich) or failed in their fiduciary or legal duties to stop it.

A huge part of Low’s ability to get away with this scam for years was the tie to Razak, who was finally ousted from office in an election in 2018, after which he and his wife were arrested for corruption. Just this week, prosecutors in his trial showed that his wife spent over $800,000 in one day on jewelry, spending that went through the 1MDB fund; I assume this is the same story Wright and Hope tell of Low taking Razak’s wife to a famous jeweler. Low, however, fled to China and appears to still be running around the country with access to at least some of his ill-gotten gains, which means the Chinese government is, for some reason, okay with him doing so in spite of an Interpol warrant out for his arrest.

Next up: Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: con men, finance, frauds, highly recommended, malaysia, non-fiction

→ June 8, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/8/19.

Of course, most of my content this week was around this year’s MLB draft, but my biggest piece is actually free for everyone to read – my oral history of the drafting of Mike Trout, as told by the people who were there. For ESPN+ subscribers, you can read my draft recaps for all 15 AL teams and all 15 NL teams. I also held a Klawchat during day two of the draft and a live Periscope chat on Friday.

I really am trying to take time off this weekend, but I still plan to send out a new email newsletter to subscribers (it’s free, you just have to sign up) by Monday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: That mass-market chocolate product you bought was probably the product of child labor, according to an extensive Washington Post report that documents the chocolate industry’s attempts to avoid accountability for sourcing its raw material. Desperate poverty in Burkina Faso and near-zero enforcement in Côte d’Ivoire have also contributed, and third-party certifications like FairTrade aren’t as reliable as they claim to be. The ultimate solution lies with consumers: Don’t buy cheap chocolate. Buy from companies that can identify their cacao sources.
Just four companies control 60% of global seed sales. This is bad news for our planet and our plates, writes chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate and now a seed activist of sorts. We’re reducing biodiversity at a time when we need plants to evolve to cope with our destruction of the environment; we’re reducing the nutrition and flavor of the plants we eat (or the meat we eat, which feeds on those plants).
The New York Times‘ editorial writers Bret Stephens (an Islamophobe and a climate change denier) and Bari Weiss have taken to extreme concern trolling over restrictions on free speech on campus, repeating the same tired (and misleading) talking points the paper has pushed for over a century.
It’s a shame the Times runs such drivel on its editorial page, because its investigative work remains top-notch, as in this piece on former alt-right devotee Caleb Cain and how Youtube helped indoctrinate him into that movement of hate.
We often hear about the mass extinction caused by anthropogenic climate change and other activities of man, but the death of one species can be a boon for another. Bullhead City, Arizona, has been overrun by caddisflies because man has gutted the populations of its predators by damming the Colorado River.
Joe Biden’s first Presidential run in 1988 was sunk in part by the revelation that he’d plagiarized parts of campaign speeches, as well as his habit of embellishing past accomplishments. The New York Times looks back at that disastrous campaign as Biden has begun to repeat his mistakes, such as plagiarizing parts of his climate change policy plan from other outlets.
Arizona cancer quack Colleen Huber, who tells patients she can cure cancer with baking soda and vitamin C, has lost her defamation suit against activist Britt Marie Hermes, a former naturopath who now works to expose the inherent fraud of ‘naturopathic medicine,’ which isn’t actually medicine at all. If you live in Arizona, perhaps consider asking your state attorney general to look into Ms. Huber’s business?
An exclusive Guardian report found that at least 200 quacks in the U.S. are using a sham therapy called ‘Cease’ on children, claiming it can prevent the measles and cure autism.
The Chicago journalist who has investigated R. Kelly’s sexual misconduct for nearly 20 years spoke to the BBC about his work and his new book on the singer, Soulless.
The S&P has performed much worse under Trump than it did under his predecessor. Populism and protectionism are not sound economic policies.
Sudan’s military toppled the country’s dictator this spring, but they’ve since cracked down on pro-democracy groups, arresting three opposition leaders this week and killing dozens of protesters in Khartoum. The coup leaders are relying on the same paramilitary forces that led the genocide in Darfur. Instability here is bad news for the region – and could make the country safe for Islamic terror groups again.
A Delaware man (originally from Queens) and former Army veteran went to York County, Pennsylvania, to try to clear up an outstanding warrant on a DUI charge. He ended up dead in a York jail, and his body was returned to the family missing several organs, including parts of his throat. The County tried to bury its response to the article by releasing a statement late on Friday afternoon.
The University of Alabama returned a $21.5 million gift from a donor who opposes the state’s anti-abortion law, even removing his name from the university’s law school. In the backwater swirling, there are some things that will never change.
The Guardian announced it will stop using inaccurate language to describe anti-abortion bills that supporters label, incorrectly, “heartbeat” bills. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says this term is inaccurate; a fetus of six weeks has no heart or cardiovascular system.
I’ve noticed in a few hotels this year that the little plastic toiletry bottles have been replaced by larger refillable containers affixed to the shower walls. It’s part of a larger movement including legislation in California that banned them in hotels of more than 50 rooms.
California’s Assembly passed a bill that would make some workers for companies like Lyft and Uber employees, rather than independent contractors, giving them greater protection from labor abuses.
The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple urged media outlets not to fall for Carlson’s bad-faith “praise” of part of Elizabeth Warren’s economic platform. And then Carlson went on air and attacked the “tyranny” of the metric system, the origin of which seems to be foreign to him.
Reading a lot of fiction improves social cognition and makes people more empathetic.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, arizona, chocolate, climate change, cost of food, frauds, links, pennsylvania, vaccines, white nationalism

→ May 3, 2019
→ By keith

Bad Blood.

Theranos was one of the hottest tech startups of the last fifteen years, at least in terms of the breathless coverage afforded to the company’s putative blood-testing technology and young founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. As you know by now, the entire thing was a giant fraud: the technology never worked, the company ducked or lied to regulators, and Holmes in particular lied to the press and investors who plowed a few hundred million dollars into the company before it collapsed. That implosion came about thanks to a few whistleblowers from inside the firm and the diligent reporting of Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreyrou, who tells the entire history of the scam in his book Bad Blood. The book is thorough, gripping, and infuriating: how did one inexperienced college dropout manage to con so many ostensibly intelligent people into believing her bullshit?

Theranos’s claim was that they could run over a hundred tests on just a single drop of blood drawn by a fingerstick by using a relatively minuscule device, first one called the Edison and later one called the miniLab, that could live in a doctor’s office, a pharmacy clinic, or even a patient’s home. This included routine tests like those for blood cholesterol levels as well as more complex tests that would ordinarily require a lot more blood, which would have to be drawn from a vein. None of this ever worked, and Theranos hid the fraud by taking blood samples back to its headquarters and running the samples on larger machines made by Siemens, all the while making increasingly grandiose claims about its technology, forging nine-figure partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway, and continuing to solicit investments at valuations that eventually crossed $5 billion, making Holmes a paper billionaire.

The media coverage of Theranos in general and Holmes in particular was willfully credulous, none more so than the Fortune cover story “This CEO’s Out for Blood,” a fawning profile that bought all of Holmes’ lies wholesale with what appears to be no attempt to independently validate any of her claims. (The writer, Roger Parloff, eventually admitted he’d been duped.) Holmes appears to have had a strategy for executing this con by co-opting the reputations of powerful, older men: she managed to pack her board with major political figures, including George Schultz and Gen. James Mattis, who all tended to be old white men with zero scientific or technical background, but whose presence carried a lot of weight with the media. She also hired attorney David Boies, eventually giving him shares in the company and a board seat, to stage scorched-earth attacks on anyone who dared criticize the company, which included intimidating former employees who might reveal that Theranos’ technology didn’t work. She even landed a spot as an Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship for the Obama Administration, only stepping down months after the fraud was revealed.

Carreyrou didn’t buy it, and he didn’t back down, all of which shows in his WSJ articles that dismantled the company’s house of lies and again shows in Bad Blood, which is meticulous in reconstructing the genesis and perpetuation of the fraud, with information gleaned from over 150 interviews with employees and others close to Theranos. He particularly benefited from information from Tyler Schultz, George Schultz’s grandson and a Theranos employee for about a year, who realized that Theranos’ technology didn’t work and that they weren’t properly verifying their results (but were still making the same claims of accuracy to the public), and who reported the company to regulators despite intense pressure and outright threats from Theranos, its lawyers, and his own family. (Schultz, who will turn 99 later this year, was a true believer in Theranos and in Holmes until well after the fraud was made public.) Bad Blood is full of details of internal interactions from Theranos that depict Holmes and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani as vindictive, paranoid bullies who didn’t care that the technology didn’t work, or simply refused to accept that it didn’t, and thought they could steamroll anyone who tried to get in their way – and for about a decade, it worked.

The overwhelming sense Bad Blood gave me is that so very many of the people involved in the scam belong in jail. Holmes and Balwani, who was also her boyfriend when she hired him, come across as sociopaths who relentlessly bullied employees and the media; both are still facing criminal charges, while Holmes settled SEC fraud charges while Balwani is fighting them. They had many allies in their scheme, from Boies (whose behavior seems unethical, at least) to the various marketing and PR flacks inside and outside Theranos who helped perpetuate the con. Does Chiat Day, the major advertising agency Theranos hired to build its image, bear any responsibility for helping disseminate untruths about the company? What about Theranos’ marketing employees or in-house attorneys, the former repeating the lies Holmes and Balwani told them, the latter using dubious tactics to intimidate former employees into signing agreements against their own interests? If Holmes and Balwani actually serve jail time – I’m skeptical, but there’s still a nonzero chance of that – it may deter some future mountebanks, but the biggest lesson of Bad Blood seems to be how many people happily went along with the scheme because they thought Theranos was going to make them rich, and because there was little direct cost to them. Patients could have died from errant medical directions that came from Theranos’ inaccurate test results, yet just about every person involved in promulgating the swindle walked away with nothing worse than a bad name on their resumes.

Carreyrou raises the most salient point that investors and reporters missed during Theranos’ days as a high-flying simurgh: the venture capital firms backing Theranos focused on high tech, but not on biotech or medical devices. The VCs with expertise in medical investments were absent. Carreyrou argues that that should have set off alarm bells for other investors or for reporters racing to laud the company or its female founder/CEO, who benefited from the media’s desire to find a rare woman among Silicon Valley leaders, from her photogenic looks, and from her overt attempts to channel Steve Jobs (which come off as delusionally creepy in the book). Con artists will never lack for marks, but when the people who would ordinarily be most interested in backing a venture head in the other direction, it should serve as at least a prompt to ask more probing questions before putting the CEO on your magazine’s cover.

Next up: I’m preparing for the upcoming amazon series by reading Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’s novel Good Omens.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: frauds, highly recommended, history of science, medicine, non-fiction

→ March 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GQ has a length profile of the prolific and highly disturbed art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole artworks valued at over $1 billion but never sold anything.
21st Century Fox was hit with a $179 million penalty by an arbitrator over a wide scheme to defraud the actors and producers of Bones of residuals from streaming on Hulu. Fox lied about the profits they were receiving from Hulu, of which Fox owns 30%, and at one point a Fox executive signed both sides of a deal between the two companies.
MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, who was a huge help to me when I was working on Smart Baseball, has a superb primer up on the Rapsodo and Edgetronic devices that are revolutionizing player development, especially in the area of ‘pitch design,’ where coaches and pitchers can work together to change or develop pitches by using real-time data that show how changes in grips or release points affect a pitch’s velocity and spin. Driveline Baseball, mentioned in Mike’s piece, has a blog post up on gaze research, or tracking how hitters see the ball. Technology has allowed teams and players to measure things that were either estimated by scouts/coaches in the past or that were simply brushed off as unmeasurable.
Little Falls, Minnesota, has found success in fighting opioid addiction by treating it as a disease, rather than as a crime or a personal failing. It’s an approach that has worked in other countries – Portugal is a paragon in this area – but goes against the Puritanical strain in American culture that sees addicts as degenerates.
What if climate change leads to enough cloud loss to further accelerate the warming of the planet? The odds of this are higher than we previously realized.
Why is California’s Attorney General refusing to release a list of cops convicted of crimes? Xavier Becerra, running for re-election this year, has even rejected public records requests from his own agency, which has led to lawsuits and would appear to violate open-records laws.
Marcela García writes in the Boston Globe how the should-have-won-Best Picture film Roma has exposed the deep racism within Mexican society.
A popular talking point among Republicans right now is that doctors are “killing babies” right after they’re born. The President said it in his State of the Union address, and it’s been repeated ad nauseam over the last month. Dr. Jen Gunter, an OBGYN who herself gave birth to a son so premature he could not survive, points out what a dangerous lie this line is.
Anti-vaxxer Forest Maready, who likes to depict people with autism as “tragedies,” has a new book coming out that resurfaces the debunked myth that vaccines cause autism. Amazon and Apple are planning to sell it, but I signed this petition asking them to pull the title from their stores. Meanwhile, an inquiry from Rep. Adam Schiff led amazon to pull six anti-vaccination “documentaries” from prime video.
Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook are harassing pro-vaccine doctors by trashing their Yelp and Google ratings as well as flooding those doctors’ Facebook posts with comments. Facebook has done little to nothing to combat the problem. The Atlantic points out that the Facebook anti-vax community is quite small, just loud, and banning them would be easy for the platform.
WIRED argues that amazon’s anti-vaxxer problem is worse than Facebook’s.
A Nova Scotia chiropractor lost her license for spreading anti-vaccine information and making other unfounded claims. We should strive for the same kinds of laws around chiropractors, naturopaths, and even the rare medical doctor who embraces this sort of bullshit.
CNN also weighed in on tech outlets failing to police the anti-vaxx bullshit on their platforms.
The Washington Post looks at how anti-vaxxers are responding to the overdue public backlash against their efforts, as well as bills in various state legislatures to end religious and/or philosophical exemptions to mandatory vaccination requirements.
Scientific American presents public policies we can use to fight anti-vaxxer lunacy.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Kevin McDermott asks why so many Americans are rejecting science in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
Italian researchers used CRISPR to create a genetically modified version of a malaria-carrying mosquito; if released, it should lead to collapses of that specific species and thus reduce malaria transmissions.
Paste‘s Jacob Weindling noticed that CNN stacked its phony ‘town hall’ for Bernie Sanders with political operatives/lobbyists posing as regular folks.
LA Times movie critic Justin Chang wrote that Green Book is the worst Best Picture winner since Crash, calling the vapid white-savior film “an embarrassment,” “insultingly glib and hucksterish,” “a self-satisfied crock,” and a “palatable brand of godawful.”
Late Night with Seth Meyers rather perfectly sent up the film with their ‘trailer’ for White Savior.
And apparently Green Book producer sent critic Jenni Miller a condescending, tone-deaf email where he doesn’t even know the main character’s real name.
In a bit of things coming full circle, Pig Destroyer’s John Jarvis has formed a new baseball-themed grindcore band, Kolten Wong City, a name that alludes to Kowloon Walled City, whose bassist, Ian Miller, is part of baseball-themed grindcore band Puig Destroyer, whose name alludes to … well, you get it now.
Why are progressive artists still working with Morrissey despite his embrace of far-right causes and outright racist statements?
Talk Talk’s singer and main songwriter Mark Hollis died this week at age 64. His last release was a solo album in 1998, after which he retired from music to spend time with his family.
Splinter writer Samer Kalaf released an email exchange he had with conservative NY Times writer Bret Stephens, without Stephens’ permission, but I think Kalaf comes off far worse here than he realizes.
Roland’s Market, a collaboration between Chris Bianco and the couple behind Tacos Chiwas, closed without warning last month. The location will be converted into a larger outpost of Bianco’s Pane Bianco.
The former editor of the Rocky Mountain News writes of his fear that local journalism will continue to fade and die as newspapers are plundered by hedge-fund owners.
Charlotte Riley describes the game Patriarchy Chicken in a column subtitled “why I refuse to move out of the way for men.”
The FTC is finally cracking down on scammers who buy fake reviews on amazon, going after the seller of a bogus weight-loss ‘supplement.’
In board game news, Disney’s Villainous: Wicked to the Core hits Target tomorrow; it’s exclusive there for a month and will later roll out to other outlets. I’ve played it, and it’s as good as the original, but with rules that are much clearer for first-time players, enough that you might do better to start with this before going back to the first game. (This is a standalone expansion that you can combine with the original.)
Renegade Game Studios has Hex Roller, a new roll-and-write game that I haven’t seen yet, up for preorder.
Days of Wonder announced a few weeks ago that their next title will be Corinth, an update/retheme of the game Yspahan that alters some core rules and eliminates the caravan (which was a dominant strategy in Yspahan).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 movies, addiction, anti-science, art, baseball, board games, california, climate change, frauds, links, movies, oscars, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 16, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/16/19.

No ESPN+ content this week, but my entire prospect ranking package is now up for subscribers, including the top 100, farm system rankings, and in-depth rankings for all 30 teams, with at least 15 prospects ranked in each system. Before my vacation I wrote up the J.T. Realmuto trade. I also held a Klawchat this Thursday and another back on February 6th.

My most recent board game review for Paste covered the light, fun engine-builder Gizmos, by the designer of Bärenpark and Imhotep, a very family-friendly title with no text to worry about that takes the engine-builder concept and boils it down to a simpler game that plays in well under an hour.

I also resumed my email newsletter, so feel free to sign up for that if you just can’t get enough Klaw in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Jessica Luther and Dan Solomon have a massive piece up at Deadspin looking at how Baylor football became a haven for sexual assault, building on their great work over the last few years at Texas Monthly.
The Verge interviews Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who has made millions of scientific papers available ‘free’ online, violating copyrights to do so – but should scientific research not just be copyrighted, but held behind prohibitive paywalls that may slow the progress of other research by denying people access? Should copyright laws, which predate the idea of research journals and existed to protect the rights of publishers and content creators, treat scientific papers the way they treat novels or films?
SkepticalRaptor has a long review of a bad book from last fall that claims the HPV vaccine isn’t safe. The book’s authors aren’t scientists, but two lawyers and a homemaker, so nobody with a science background, and it shows in the text.
Amanita phalloides, the deadly mushroom colloquially known as the death-cap, is spreading across North America.
My friends Tim Grierson and Will Leitch ranked every film that won the Oscar for Best Picture. I’ve probably seen only 20 or so of these, but I at least agree with their praise of numbers 1, 3, 6, 12, and 17.
Why don’t we have a vaccine for streptococcus A, the aftereffects of which, including rheumatic heart disease and sepsis, kill half a million people a year? It’s a combination of a regulatory screwup, successful medical interventions in developed countries, and the low profit margins of vaccines.
In a Guardian longread, Tom Yarwood writes about surviving being sexually molested by a music teacher when he was a child. He’s specific about the nature of the abuse, in case you might find this triggering.
The BBC looks at how Helsinki ended street homelessness through progressive policies designed to get such people off the streets into stable housing, even if they have substance-abuse problems.
Laura Snapes writes in the Guardian that the Ryan Adams allegations are just the start in a field where such “beta male misogyny” is rampant.
Measles is on the rise in Europe thanks to anti-vaxxers, and our state laws here need to keep up by eliminating all non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren.
Facebook’s role in spreading vaccine-denial bullshit has come under fire in two directions – the rise of closed groups that freely share false information against vaccines, and now anti-vaxxer groups using Facebook ad targeting to serve ads to pregnant women scaring them away from vaccines.
Some unvaccinated teens are now going around their parents to get vaccinated or doing so as soon as they’re of age. I’d drive any unvaccinated kid to the doctor if they had the legal side sorted out to get their shots.
There’s a measles outbreak in the Philippines, including the capital city of Manila, with nearly 13 million people in its metropolitan area.
Now some especially dumbshit parents are refusing the vitamin K shot for newborns. It’s essential to help newborns’ blood clot properly, so look for a bunch of babies bleeding to death needlessly because their parents are morons and the law lets them stay that way.
Climate change may melt most Himalayan glaciers in the next 80 years, which, I don’t know, sounds like a national emergency to me.
Scientific American looks at proposed policies to combat rising temperatures in Phoenix, although I notice water conservation, an outright failure of the city and state governments there, isn’t mentioned.
Math geeks may enjoy this paper (PDF) on the Sheldon Conjecture, based on an episode of the Big Bang Theory where that character says 73 is the perfect prime number – and it’s possible that the writers were more right than they knew.
Harvard professor Jill Abramson stands accused of plagiarism as well as inaccurate quotes in her latest book, and she seems to think she’s above the fray. I’ve emailed multiple deans at Harvard to ask for any sign they’re even aware of these problems – she teaches seminars on writing there, for crying out loud – but so far I’ve had no response.
Instagram “influencer” Rachel Hollis has also been accused of plagiarizing quotes on her social media account.
Bernie 2020? Not so fast, if you look at his history of embracing pseudoscience.
Julian Edelman’s title as Super Bowl MVP exposes our ‘selective morality’ on performance-enhancing drugs in sports, Hunter Felt writes for the Guardian.
Oh, we back on that again? New York’s City Council is considering a ban on foie gras, based again on a misunderstanding of how the delicacy is actually produced. I’m not a huge fan myself, at least not commensurate with its reputation among foodies, but this is a needless regulation, and shouldn’t be near the top of anyone’s priority list of rules on food production and sale.
I shouldn’t laugh, but I did: “Investors” in a cryptocurrency exchange might be out $137 million because the founder died and no one knows his passwords.
Jane Coaston wrote in Vox about conservative pundits’ bad faith arguments around Gov. Ralph Northam while also arguing that the governor, who appeared in blackface in a yearbook photo from his time in graduate school, should resign. I feel like we should just turn Virginia off and turn it back on again.
George Will argues in the Washington Post that Democrats can bail out Trump by nominating someone too liberal/progressive in 2020. I don’t agree, but I think Will makes a cogent argument about the center (without, I think, considering voters on the far left who might have abstained in 2016).
A great podcast from the BBC explains why we don’t care about the war in Yemen, which we support by funding our ‘friends’ the Saudis.
Two unrolled Twitter threads worth reading: Harvard professor Juliette Kayam depantsed Rep. Dan Crenshaw over border security and the wall.
Writer Anand Giridharadas was invited to fill in as guest speaker at a dinner, only to have the ‘liberal’ crowd defend the Koch brothers. The dinner took place at The Players, a private social club founded by Edwin Booth, which has also been accused of labor law violations (detailed within).
Board games! Floodgate Games’ Bad Maps is now available for pre-order.
The board game Evolution is now out as an app for iOS, Android, and Steam. I have a review coming for Ars Technica, but I’ll report here that it’s pretty great – it looks fantastic and I think it’s easy to read, learn, and play on a tablet screen.
Villainous: Wicked to the Core, is a new standalone expansion to last year’s hit game Villainous, and will be available exclusively through Target starting on March 3rd, with pre-orders through that link. I’ve played it five times already, and it’s more of the same but with better rules explaining each villain character’s unique powers and victory conditions. This comes with three new characters – the Evil Queen, Doctor Facilier, and Hades (no James Woods, thank goodness) – and may be combined any way you like with the six villains from the original game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, board games, climate change, frauds, links, math, metoo, oscars, vaccines, virginia

→ January 28, 2019
→ By keith

FYRE.

My prospects ranking package began its rollout this morning for ESPN+ subscribers with the list of 15 guys who just missed the top 100.

—

By now there’s a pretty good chance you’ve seen FYRE, the Netflix documentary on the ill-fated music festival to be held in the Bahamas in the spring of 2017 that turned out to be a giant con run by its founder Billy McFarland and musician Ja Rule. (There is a competing Hulu documentary on the festival that I have not seen.) Netflix chose to release this briefly in theaters, which will qualify it for awards consideration in the next cycle, and for sheer entertainment value it’s among the top documentaries I’ve ever seen.

I love a good con in fiction, but this con happened in real life, and the most amazing theme of FYRE is how so many people working on the festival saw the con happening in real time and did nothing to stop it. Fyre itself was originally an app that would allow people to book celebrities for events, streamlining a process that was opaque even to people with the money to do this but not the access. At some point, McFarland – and we’ll get to him in a moment – had the idea to create a music festival to promote the app, and then plowed ahead with the concept, despite lacking any experience in running festivals, and then hired a bunch of people he knew to try to run the event, half of whom didn’t know what they were doing and half knew what they were doing but couldn’t execute given the constraints of time, money, and location. Many of these folks appear on camera and voice their concerns that it was never going to work, but as far as I can tell, none of them actually quit the organization – one was fired for raising these issues – or did much beyond say that they thought the plans were in trouble.

McFarland appears here only in footage from the planning meetings, because it turns out they pretty much filmed everything as they were trying to make this festival happen, but isn’t interviewed directly; he does answer questions in the Hulu documentary, the producers of which paid him to do so. What FYRE does give us, however, is a sense of just what a grifter McFarland really is: he’d previously come up with Magnises, a members-only club with a credit card-like passport that would give members access to exclusive events, an actual club to visit in Manhattan, and discounts on hard-to-get tickets to concerts and shows. While it delivered on some of its promises, eventually the company started overpromising and underdelivering, or just not delivering at all, leading to a surge in complaints and cancellations just as McFarland was bragging about massive membership growth – and also turning his attention to Fyre.

His ability to get Magnises off the ground and even build some kind of customer base set up the Fyre fiasco in two ways: It became clear that he was very good at getting publicity, and he started a pattern of trying to separate wealthy or high-income millennials from their money. The Fyre Festival wasn’t just poorly run, but poorly funded, and the company took money from would-be concert goers for things that didn’t exist, like housing on or near the beach, and eventually came up with the idea of wristbands that attendees would use to pay for “extra” events like jetskiing but that was just a scam to get working capital so the concert wouldn’t go under before it started.

Of course, the most entertaining parts of Fyre come down to the depths of the scam, and how McFarland appears to be so privileged that he can’t understand the word ‘no.’ I won’t spoil it for people who haven’t seen the film, but the Evian water story has quickly become a meme, with good reason. People did get to what was supposed to be the concert site, only to find it wasn’t ready for anybody, with just some hurricane tents propped up on the beach and inadequate supplies or housing for the people who did show up, with the concert cancelled just hours before the event was supposed to begin, and no plans to get all these people back home after they were flown to the site on a chartered plane. McFarland appears to have tried to just keep a half-step ahead of the people while stealing their money, and I think the most shocking part (other than the Evian bit) is that he is eventually arrested over this scam, gets out on bail, and immediately sets out to begin another grift, this one even more blatant than the previous ones.

Nobody feels sorry for the well-heeled Fyre Festival customers who were willing to fly to the Bahamas for what was essentially billed as a luxury version of Coachella and kept handing over cash without doing much to see if the people taking their money were reliable. I can’t say I felt a lot of sympathy for them either, but that schadenfreude was not a major part of FYRE‘s message to me. I can’t get over how many people worked on this project, knew it was a dumpster fire on a flatbed rail car that was slowly going off the tracks into a ravine, and stuck around – even when they weren’t getting paid. One person, never identified, did leak details to a site that called Fyre Festival a scam and probably contributed to its downfall (or at least to the rise of skeptical media coverage of it), but everyone we see here except for the one who was fired kept working here until the event was cancelled. (The guy who was fired – the one real voice of reason here – is the same guy who brags that he learned to fly by playing Flight Simulator.)

This event never gets off the ground were it not for a clever social media campaign that made heavy use of ‘influencers,’ notably those on Instagram, who were promised compensation if they would simply talk about the festival and post its image of a blank orange square. (I don’t know why either.) The documentary skirts the subject too much for my liking, because ultimately, influencer culture is itself a fraud. Yes, if you have a large social media following, you can direct people to buy certain products and services, just by nature of the volume of eyeballs on your content. That absolves the influencer of any responsibility for what they appear to recommend, which was later codified by the FTC into guidelines requiring influencers to disclose “material connections” to brands they recommend, and to do so in a way that will be clear to most users. I have a large Twitter following and modest audiences on Facebook and Instagram (the latter of which I’m using more, mostly just for fun or silly posts), and so I am offered a lot of stuff in the hopes that I’ll recommend it – sometimes things just show up at the house. I have a simple policy: I won’t recommend anything I don’t like or use myself. I have told publishers not to send items. I declined a gift card to a restaurant chain (no, not Olive Garden) because there was a quid pro quo attached to it. Granted, I am not an “influencer” using it as my primary source of income – but maybe that’s not the most ethical way to make a living, either.

As for the Hulu version, I’ll probably watch it because I have a couple of close friends who’ve urged me to do so, even just so we can discuss it, although the consensus seems to be that FYRE is better. And it is wonderfully bonkers at so many points. Ja Rule has a quote near the end that is a jawdropper. The Evian story and McFarland’s third scam, while out on bail, are both are-you-fucking-serious moments. The Lord of the Flies (Lord of the Fyres?) scenes on the beach and later at the airport are both enough to make you screw up your faces in disbelief, although those beach scenes made me a little uncomfortable as these well-off young adults complained over conditions that probably a billion people in the world experience as their normal. It’s shocking in so many ways, none more so than the grifter Billy himself, who must be some sort of sociopath for the ease with which he lies to people and to cameras while gleefully helping himself to others’ cash.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2019 movies, con men, documentaries, frauds, highly recommended, movies

→ November 24, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/24/18.

My one ESPN+ post this week covered the James Paxton trade, which included one of my favorite pitching prospects in the minors, lefty Justus Sheffield. I didn’t hold a chat this week due to the holiday.

You don’t have to sign up for my free email newsletter, but you’re missing out on lots of words.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was this Washington Post article that tells two narratives in parallel: a liberal satirist who baits right-wingers with insane (fake) stories, and a retiree who believes all of it is true.
The New Yorker‘s Bill McKibben looks at how climate change and its extreme weather effects are shrinking the planet, reducing the habitable and arable land through rising sea levels, increasing temperatures, and water shortages. He also looks at the ongoing fight to “muddle” public opinion on climate change, spearheaded by Republican officials, oil change executives, and pollster Frank Luntz.
WIRED looks at the shady business of paid influences on Instagram and Youtube.
A survivor of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana spoke to the BBC about surviving the cult and mass suicide, and living with that memory for the last four decades.
An author complained that he had a hard time publishing his (apparently not very good) novel because of sexism against men or something. Wonkette tears his rather naïve complaint to shreds. It’s hard to get a novel published unless you’re already published or otherwise famous, and gender bias or political correctness have nothing to do with that.
A Vancouver, Washington, man broke Indian law and died while trying to ‘bring Jesus’ to the North Sentinelese people, one of the last uncontacted tribes on the planet. His questionable religious intentions aside, visiting an isolated population with all of your developed-world germs is unbefuckinglievably irresponsible. The natives likely have no antibodies for many of the pathogens he was carrying.
A nurse working at a hospital in the path of the California wildfires called her two daughters to say goodbye as the flames approached.
Researchers may have discovered evidence of somatic gene recombination in the human brain, a process of retranscription that appears to occur in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, although the authors were explicit that they can’t say this is a cause of the disease.
One of the country’s largest oil refiners has donated over $1 million to Mitch McConnell’s dark-money group One Nation.
In 2015, Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D) wrote a letter to defend the character of a judge who beat his wife badly enough for her to require reconstructive surgery on her face, saying that it was a one-time event and not the man she knew. Last weekend the judge stabbed his ex-wife to death. The revelation appears to have ended Fudge’s bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as the lead Democrat in the House; it should also end her tenure in Congress.
Seven women are suing Dartmouth, alleging serial harassment and sexual assault by three professors in the psychology and brain sciences departments.
There’s a chicken pox outbreak in very liberal Asheville, North Carolina, a stronghold of anti-vaxxer morons.
And there’s a measles outbreak among the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, thanks to a group calling itself Parents Teaching and Advocating for Children’s Health that has been going to residents’ homes and scaring parents with hoax stories about vaccines.
The mother of a child who has survived cancer tweeted about what exposure to measles meant for her child during chemotherapy, when her immune system was compromised.
America’s new political backwater is Georgia, where the Governor-elect oversaw his own election and purged over a million voters from rolls, many of them persons of color. I have no idea why everyday Georgians are tolerating this subversion of their civil rights.
A dark-money group posted ads on Facebook, using Bernie Sanders’ image, to encourage Democrats to defect to the Green Party on election day. The group in question failed to file required paperwork with the FEC, and Facebook refused to remove the ads when Sen. Sanders’ office requested that they do so. The group’s Facebook page is still active as of Friday night.
Several companies have asked Republican Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith to refund their contributions after she joked about public hangings. She’ll face Mike Espy (D) in a runoff election on Tuesday in Mississippi, where African-Americans make up the largest percentage of the population of any of the fifty states.
Speaking of Mississippi, federal judge Carlton Reeves struck down its abortion ban as unconstitutional, and he had some shit on his mind about the “pure gaslighting” of state legislators over this law and the state’s long history of oppression of women and minorities.
Mumbai-born Garima Amora, a chef in Bangkok, became the first Indian woman to win a Michelin star this month for her work at the restaurant Gaa.
And finally, Our Dear Leader made some utterly ridiculous statements about Babe Ruth – everything short of calling him a black man – but Toronto Star writer Daniel Dale was there to set the record straight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, frauds, links, mississippi, north carolina, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 17, 2018
→ By keith

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

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board games, climate change, environment, frauds, links, longreads, new hampshire, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/10/18.

I didn’t have any new ESPN+ posts this week, with my free agent rankings going up on November 2nd and my trade market overview due to run this upcoming Monday. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday, and did a Periscope video chat on Wednesday (and even played a little something on guitar).

My latest board game review for Paste covers the cute, competitive, asymmetric game Root, where cuddly forest creatures fight battles for control of the forest, and each player has unique pieces, abilities, and paths to victory. It’s quite clever.

Feel free to sign up for that free email newsletter I keep talking about and occasionally remember to send out.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Undark exposes the conservative groups fighting climate chance education in Florida classrooms, as well as how they wage this war and their efforts to bring it to other states. The irony of failing to teach the reality of anthropogenic climate change in a state that might be the most adversely affected by it should not be lost on you.
Working conditions in the Tesla factory would make Upton Sinclair blush; medical staff are “forbidden from calling 911 without permission,” and five former clinic employees told The Center for Investigative Reporting’s writers that the on-site clinic’s practices are “unsafe and unethical.” One source was fired in August by the clinic, which she says is because she raised concerns about the clinic’s treatment of workers. Tesla’s pricing starts around $35,000 for its model 3 sedan to over $140,000 for its Model X P100D SUV.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was still working in a Manhattan Taqueria when she began her campaign for Congress, and Bon Appetit spoke to her there about the intersection between food and politics. She points out that food is intertwined with climate change, minimum wage laws, immigration, health care, education, and more (I’d add trade policy/protectionism, other environmental regulations, and water rights to the list.)
Anti-vaccine PACs helped shape this week’s midterm ballots, as those groups fought to defeat Republicans who weren’t sufficiently anti-vax during primary races. Dr. Paul Offit, who helped develop the rotavirus vaccine, wrote about how he’d like to answer anti-vax loons who still argue that vaccines cause autism.
Ninety-eight year old Roger Angell penned this wonderfully angry essay on the power of voting for the New Yorker, which ran it the day before Election Day.
The deputy editorial page editor for the Washington Post writes that new acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker is a crackpot.
Wisconsin Republicans are trying to strip the incoming Democratic governor of much of the office’s power right now, which is particularly sad given the mess the outgoing Scott Walker leaves in the state’s education budget. Most notable is that he gave Taiwanese company Foxconn up to $4 billion in subsidies and tax breaks, a deal that would have resulted in the state paying about $230,000 per job created … if it had even created the number of jobs promised, which it hasn’t. That money would have filled the education budget gap and then some.
If Brian Kemp wins the gubernatorial race in Georgia, his victory would need an asterisk, according to Prof. Carol Anderson, who has written a book on voter suppression called One Person, No Vote. I said in my Periscope chat this week that when leaders in less-developed countries steal elections, the citizens take to the streets in peaceful protests and workers strike. I never thought we’d need that here, but that may be the only response Georgians have here.
The Kansas City Star exposes the overconfidence and disorganization that sank Kris Kobach’s campaign and gave Kansas its first Democratic win for a statewide office in 12 years.
The Houston Chronicle has had to retract eight stories written by Austin bureau chief Mike Ward after discovering that he’d fabricated dozens of people he quoted in those articles.
Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic that America’s problem is not tribalism, but base racism, given how one of our two major parties seems to rely on race-baiting and trafficking in stereotypes to rally its base. And it works.
Trump mouthed off last week about making the Federal Reserve less independent; Venezuela’s experience demonstrates why that’s a foolish notion. Of course, Trump also blamed the three eastern Baltic nations for starting the war in Yugoslavia, so I don’t think we’re dealing with the brightest bulb in the chandelier here.
A giant supernova named Cow appeared without warning in June and has given scientists a rare look at the birth of either a black hole or a neutron star.
Oakland chef Charlie Hallowell, whose restaurant Pizzaiolo I visited and really enjoyed, is trying to come back to his old life after more than a dozen women came forward to say he sexually harassed them. He’s facing some backlash, but also getting frankly unwarranted support from other men in the business who seem to gloss over his behavior. The landlord for his newest restaurant, Western Pacific in Berkeley, is Lakireddy Bali Reddy, who pled guilty to human trafficking, bringing underage girls from India to the United States so he could have sex with them.
A mob of protesters gathered outside Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house and threatened his safety. Reason argues it’s not just wrong, but actively harmful to the cause. I have zero sympathy for Carlson, who has chosen this life of fomenting bigotry for profit, but I agree with the column. Don’t threaten him or his family. You want to make him stop? Go after his advertisers. Cut your cable subscription. Ask public places you frequent to stop showing Fox News. But threatening journalist won’t help … although one protester says the reports of threats are highly embellished.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford continues to face death threats, moving four times this year, while the man who assaulted her gets to sit on the Supreme Court and decide how the rest of us can live our lives.
A fake doctor in California who promises a “miracle cure” for cancer using baking soda was sued by a patient and hit with a $105 million judgment. The money seems tangential – the point here is that these charlatans prey on the desperate, and the law seems too slow or simply unequipped to stop them.
Dr. Devah Pager died earlier this month of pancreatic cancer at age 46. Her work helped demonstrate that being black in the job market was, in effect, as big of a negative as having a felony conviction was
Comedian Patrick Monahan (no, not the Train guy) wrote about Louise Mensch’s legendary tweet about Steve Bannon possibly getting the death penalty for New York magazine’s The Cut. I take no pleasure in reposting this.
New York beverage director, author, and bitters expert Sother Teague writes about how he uses his role to espouse important causes, as with his NYC bar Coup, where proceeds go to groups fighting the worst policies of this administration. I appreciated this quote in particular: “Diminishing language such as ‘stick to sports’ holds no place and only serves to display the ignorance of those who say it.”
In the last two years, two mental health professionals in Monterey County have taken their own lives, including David Soskin, who drove off Highway 1 at Hurricane Point in June. Less than two years previously, a colleague with whom Soskin had clashed, Robert Jackson, took his own life, having left his job with the county after accusing Soskin of creating a hostile work environment.
This (unrolled) Twitter thread shows the bonkers elections in Alaska from Tuesday, with ties going back 40-plus years. Don Young won re-election yet again; he’s been Alaska’s at-large Representative since 1972, before I was born, after losing the election but taking the seat because his opponent died before election day. Young is still just the fourth Representative in the state’s history, even though he refuses to hold town halls and holds many views best left in the 19th century.
My employer did a nice thing for longtime employees, shutting down the Magic Kingdom for a night to allow Disney cast members of 40-plus years of service to enjoy the park for themselves.
Finally, this magic trick won for the best close-up trick at the International Federation of Magic Societies’ 2018 World Championship of Magic, and it’s dazzling:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, climate change, disney, education, florida, frauds, georgia, journalism, kansas, links, metoo, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression, wisconsin

→ November 4, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/4/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I ranked the top 50 free agents this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday, before a brief vacation to Disneyworld to help my parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter, which isn’t to say the content is better, just that I’m sending it more often.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Washington Post has a long investigation by writer Radley Balko into the rot inside the Little Rock, Arkansas, Police Department that led to an incompetent, racist cop shooting an unarmed 15-year-old black kid, lying about it, and escaping conviction in two trials. The cop in question, Terry Hastings, was hired over the objections of another officer, who pointed out that Hastings had attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting – normally a disqualifying event, but Hastings’ father was also on the LRPD force.
This Atlantic longread by a writer whose grandfather was ostracized for a failed attempt to solve a major physics problem also delves into deeper questions of what drives geniuses and how orthodox institutions treat apostasy.
A Harvard researcher has a new theory of mitochondrial function and evolution that may help lead to new treatments for diseases of mitochondrial dysfunction, including many fatal muscular diseases.
Stalwart indie bookstore The Strand is unionized, making it a bit unusual in the bookstore world, but the store’s very wealthy owners have fought modest pay raises and benefits increases. The Strand is a wonderful store with knowledgeable employees and an enormous selection of new, used, and rare books, but this column says much of its revenue comes from renting out its space rather than the sale of books.
The Washington Monthly has a longread accusing writer Salena Zito, whose pieces cover Trump voters out in rural America, of fabricating quotes and stories and manipulating quotes, as well as other journalistic sins, even as her conservative employers look the other way. She has taught at least one seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, but the school hasn’t responded to my request for comment yet.
Was Friends homophobic, ahead of its time, or both? This essay on LitHub argues both sides of it, and explains why the show was too cautious on LGBT issues even as it gently expanded the boundaries of what was shown on network television.
Facebook ignored warnings about Russian interference in Ukraine via troll farms, part of the company’s general unwillingness to look at information warfare outside the U.S. that could have tipped the company off to what Russia did here in 2016.
The white man who shot up a Tallahassee yoga studio, killing two women, was an ‘incel’ who had twice been charged with assaulting women as well as a history of posting misogynistic and homophobic content online. He was still able to buy an AR-15.
President Trump barely works at all, high irony after years of the right criticizing Obama, by all accounts a workaholic, if he dared to take an afternoon to play golf.
The self-immolation of white nationalist Twitter troll Jacob Wohl to smear Robert Mueller is lovingly detailed by The Cut.
Many western billionaires have invested in ‘doomsday’ properties in New Zealand, arguing that its isolation makes it ideal in case of a global pandemic, war, or other apocalypse. They don’t all sound terribly sane to me.
CRISPR gene editing has been long on promise but light on results so far, but a new research effort found it might help treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Transgender neurobiologist Ben Barres died last year of cancer; his autobiography just came out and Nature has a very positive review.
The Supreme Court refused to block a lawsuit demanding that the US government act on climate change. You know my views on the subject, but do we have a constitutional right to a clean environment?
Fourteen teachers at a Middleton, Idaho, elementary school are on paid administrative leave after wearing racist Halloween costumes, as well as dressing up as the border wall with the MAGA slogan on it. I don’t have much hope under this administration, but it seems like a federal civil rights violation took place here.
A pediatrician in California rails against bogus vaccine exemption letters written by doctors who rely on genetic quackery. There is no such thing as a genetic predisposition to vaccine injury. Doctors who claim they have found these cases in children are merely profiteering and should lose their licenses to practice medicine.
The Daily Beast writes that vaccine denial is now a Republican epidemic. Voting for science increasingly means voting Democrat./
ThinkProgress talked to experts who explained that the claims about Bitcoin’s future energy consumption are bogus.
Ethiopia now has a female President, its first in the country’s history. The position is ceremonial, but she is still the sole female head of state in Africa right now, and her selection is more evidence that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who set up a cabinet where half the posts were filled by women, is a great progressive hope for a country that has lived under tyrants since World War II.
The President sputtered out a false claim that he could revoke birthright citizenship by … I don’t know, tweeting about it, which is ironic since his Florida property does big business with Russians who want to give birth on U.S. soil to secure American citizenship.
Haaretz details Trump’s lengthy history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric and tropes to stir up his base, and how that contributed to last weekend’s massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Jewish leaders there told Trump he wasn’t welcome in their city until he disavowed white nationalism. He showed up anyway, and of course has blamed the deaths of eleven Jews in the shooting on the lack of armed guards at the temple.
The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer points out that the inane story of the migrant caravan contributed to the shooting, part of yet another bullshit campaign from the GOP (“but her emails”), this time with anti-Semitic underpinning and violent consequences. As Serwer points out, this caravan is a threat to exactly nobody, and is still weeks away from reaching our border – if it even gets that far.
One other reason the caravan story is codswallop? There aren’t enough people in Central America to matter to U.S. immigration numbers.
Indiana Law Professor Ian Samuel writes in the Guardian that Republicans are close to an invincible grip on power, even as a clear minority party, thanks to vote-rigging, voter suppression, and some favorable SCOTUS rulings. The money quote: “For the first time, a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22 million fewer – than the senators that voted against him.”
Need another reason to vote blue on Tuesday? Global warming is more advanced than we thought, as the oceans have absorbed far more heat than we realized. The oceans absorb that heat, and carbon dioxide, and become more acidic, which leads to the deaths of coral reefs, and that in turn ripples up the food chain and threatens human diets.
The Arizona Board of Education rejected outgoing Superintendent Diane Douglas’ plan to push creationism in public schools, which was just going to lose in court anyway, but what a waste of everyone’s time.
Proof that evolution is real is right before us in antibiotic resistance, which British Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies said last week threatens to take us back to the dark ages.
In a bit of good news, residents of Southampton, England, formed a human chain to help a small community book store relocate, with 250 volunteers passing the 2000 books person to person from the old location to the new one.

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