links — Page 25

→ March 24, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/24/18.

My column identifying some potential breakout players for 2018 is up for Insiders. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Reiner Knizia’s Sakura, a light, quick-playing game where players all chase the lead ’emperor’ token, but where you can move your opponents as well and try to push them into the emperor, costing them points and sending them to the back of the queue.

Smart Baseball is out in paperback! U.S. Residents can enter a sweepstakes from HarperCollins to win a copy of the book and a phone call with me.

And now, the links…

Former Utah State basketball player Jalen Moore explains in an essay on the Players’ Tribune why he walked away from the NBA to deal with what sounds like crippling panic disorder.
Writing for the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz went inside to see how Reddit is coping with trolls, abuse, and harassment while also considering the need to allow users to express themselves (or else they might not have a business). My personal experiences on Reddit have been largely negative, so while I have an account there, I rarely even open the site.
The Guardian looks at “joint enterprise” laws in the U.K., which led to eleven people earning jail sentences for one murder, even though only one of the eleven actually participated in the killing. The piece argues that the laws’ application particularly targets young black men.
Mari Uyehara writes for GQ about the ‘free speech’ grifters decrying so-called “PC culture” on campuses.
This longread on a snake-oil saleswoman pushing fermented cabbage juice belongs in an April Fool’s joke post.
Here’s an easy tip on how to turn off “platform sharing” on Facebook, now that we all have some evidence that Facebook never bothered to protect users’ data from illicit use.
Brian Wansink, the Cornell food “scientist” who has been repeatedly accused of p-hacking and otherwise manipulating data to produce misleading reports and headlines, appears to have fraudulently accused Joy of Cooking of promoting unhealthy eating.
FEMA ignored requests for fuel from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, so thousands of tons of food went to waste for lack of refrigeration.
The New York Times sent travel writers to five islands devastated by the pair of hurricanes to see how their tourism industries have rebounded, if at all. Most hotels and restaurants have yet to reopen on St. John, St. Martin, and other islands that were hit by both storms.
The newest nominee to lead the Centers for Disease Control is a virologist with a long track record of research into HIV and AIDS … and accusations of scientific misconduct as well as support for abstinence-only sex education, writes Ed Yong for the Atlantic. Robert Redfield also has virtually no public health experience, unprecedented for a CDC director.
The San Luis Obispo Tribune investigates the death in police custody of a schizophrenic man who was restrained, tortured, and who then died while officers watched. An FBI investigation appears to be ongoing.
Will Leitch looks back at baseball’s “tepid” offseason for New York and asks if we’re leaded for labor strife after 2021.
Former Congressman Joe Walsh, now a conservative talk radio host/provocateur, has become one of Trump’s most vocal critics from the hard right. Walsh has defended the Mueller investigation, argued against selling the 2017 tax bill to voters (saying it won’t have any impact for most people), and criticized Trump’s attacks on the press.
Pennsylvania Republicans are trying to impeach the state’s Supreme Court in retaliation for the latter’s ruling against the GOP’s gerrymandering the state’s Congressional districts. I feel like PA residents should send diapers to these clowns’ offices. Pennsylvania had repeatedly shown up in analyses of the most gerrymandered states, as the Republican Party there split up the heavily Democratic southeastern portion of the state to tilt those seats to themselves.
Michigan State Senator and now Republican gubernatorial candidate Patrick Corbeck is a pseudoscience-spouting loon, a creationist anti-vaxxer who is now touting baseless conspiracy theories about electromagnetic radiation.
Harvard Professor Jorge Dominguez, accused by ten women of sexual harassment who also say the school knew about Dominguez’s transgressions and did little or nothing, is retiring, although the investigation continues. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
An Alabama sheriff *legally* siphoned off $750,000 in public money meant to feed prisoners in his jurisdiction and used it to buy a beach house – and then he retaliated against the source behind a local newspaper’s investigation. Maybe this is just me, but I think any locale where this is legal and supported would qualify as a “shithole.”
I’ve criticized Arizona’s government many times for its general lack of urgency on issues related to the environment, including water usage and climate change, but the state’s utility regulatory commission did something very good, demanding that utility APS stop new natural gas projects and boost renewable energy sources. The commission, which comprises five Republicans, has long been a mere rubber-stamp group for the companies it regulates. The state is now in a drought that has been going on since 1996.
France is experiencing an uptick in measles again, yet more damage wrought by Andrew Wakefield’s debunked, fraudulent paper and the various idiots who still think vaccines cause autism. France made MMR vaccination for infants mandatory as of January 1st, so let’s hope that puts an end to this outbreak.
The House passed “right to try” legislation this week, even though it’s not going to help anyone and may just spread false hope while reducing patient access to these drugs through existing, more realistic programs.
The open-access journal Scientific Reports, published by the same group behind Nature, finally retracted a paper nearly two years after they learned parts of it were plagiarized — and after a dozen of its board members resigned in protest that it wasn’t retracted a year ago.
Biohacking is bullshit and probably dangerous too.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker lost a lawsuit over his refusal to call special elections to fill vacated legislature seats in his state, a policy that would have left some residents without representation in at least one body for over a year.
Georgia Republicans are pushing a bill to restrict voting hours in heavily Democratic Atlanta. I assume next they’ll introduce literacy tests and a poll tax.
Opponents of abortion rights like to claim that the procedure is dangerous so they can pass laws that require doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital or even to perform the procedures at hospitals or surgical centers. Five states require doctors to contradict known science and tell women there’s a link between breast cancer and abortions. (There isn’t, in case that wasn’t clear.) A new study finds that abortion in the United States is safe, which underscores that these laws are about religion, not about protecting women.
I just discovered that Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian author behind the bestselling Neapolitan Quartet, writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Her latest entry argues that everything in women’s lives has been “codified by male needs.”
No, there was not a Ku Klux Klan rally at the 1924 Democratic Convention. That didn’t stop people from spreading the lie on social media – or Breitbart from repeating it.
Gateway Pundit, another far-right blog – with White House press credentials – repeated a different lie, this one libeling the Democratic Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County after the Parkland massacre.
If you own a VR device like Oculus Rift, you can now play the board game Catan on the platform. I tried a beta version back in November and it was novel, but still the same game.
Please enjoy this delightful Miyazaki-inspired tourism ad for the lovely state of Oregon:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, arizona, baseball, guns, harvard, links, longreads, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 17, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/17/18.

My biggest news this week is that Smart Baseball is now out in paperback. This edition has a new afterword covering a few new developments from the 2017 season.

For Insiders this week, I had three posts from the Cactus League, covering:
• Hunter Greene & prospects from four orgs (CIN, LAD, CWS, LAA)
• Chris Paddack, Adrian Morejon, and other Padres & Rockies prospects
• Mackenzie Gore and even more Padres prospects.

I also wrote about the Jake Arrieta contract. Due to spring travel, the next chat may not be until April, unless I get a rainout on the road somewhere.

Here on the dish, I wrote up a slew of new restaurants I tried in Arizona this month.

And now, the links…

One true longread this week: Jane Meyer profiles Christopher Steele of ‘Steele dossier’ fame for the New Yorker, which, in particular, shows the absurd, counterfactual lengths to which the President’s sycophants will go to defend him.
The Guardian has revealed how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook profile data on 50 million users, without authorization, to help Trump’s election campaign in 2016.
Meanwhile, the Administration is pushing new voter suppression efforts, like dispatching Secret Service agents to polling stations; fortunately Maryland is already considering legislation to combat such efforts.
This extremely candid interview with former ESPN President John Skipper was illuminating, and also explains why he quit so abruptly, just days after an all-hands meeting where he explained his strategy for the company going forward.
The Iowa GOP is hard at work trying to rig upcoming elections, through such means as putting the Republican candidate first on nearly all ballots in the state. Richard Thaler wrote in Nudge that the candidate listed first gets a 3.5% bump in votes, more if the candidates are generally not well known (e.g., there’s no incumbent).
The Justice Department is fighting for an anti-vaxxer parent in Wisconsin under the bullshit guise of “religious freedom.” The plaintiff was a nurse in a nursing home and refused to get the flu shot mandated by her employers, who fired her, because she’s a fucking idiot. I don’t think that goes far enough: You should lose any medical license you hold if you decline to get vaccinations mandatory in your profession.
The GOP tax bill, or “tax scam” depending on your perspective, was not really tax reform (which I favor), but just shifted around a bunch of giveaways to corporations. The Center for Public Integrity broke down the corporate welfare, including tax breaks for craft beverage makers, a rum tax that benefits distillers on Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, tax credits for mining operations on Native American reservations, and a faster depreciation schedule for people who own racehorses.
Matthew Yglesias examines the truth about public and campus support for free speech in the face of anecdotal claims that ‘political correctness’ is threatening it.
A disabled writer explains what the elegies to Stephen Hawking got wrong about the astrophysicist’s disability. Also, the death of a great scientist was a perfect time for a Republican Texas state rep to show his ass.
Is Russia fomenting anti-GMO sentiment online? One study looking at online coverage of the topic found Russian sites would slip anti-GMO content even into unrelated articles. GMO foods are safe, and public bias against them, which is rising, isn’t based on any actual science.
The Oath Keepers are a white, anti-government, extremist group that has, among other things, shown up unbidden to protect white businesses during the Ferguson riots or to ‘guard’ schools in the wake of shootings. Their founder stands accused of beating his wife and trying to choke his daughter, in a request his wife filed for a restraining order as she seeks a divorce.
The Guardian explores the questions and evidence around vitamin D’s role in health, including mixed signals on supplements and the difficulty of getting enough in plant-centric diets.
Climate change is very real, but FEMA has dropped the term from its strategic plans.
Arizona will hold a special election in April to fill the seat vacated by Trent Franks; it’s expected to go to Republican candidate Debbie Lesko, given how red the district is, even though Lesko denies climate change and blames it on the sun. Her opponent, Dr. Hiral Tipirneni, accepts the science on climate change and advocates increased solar and wind power in the state.
A new study by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that people who believe the untruth that the MMR vaccine causes autism were then less likely to accept a hypothetical vaccine against Zika.
Our diets have shaped how our species has evolved, with adaptations like lactose tolerance and lighter skin arising in response to what we eat.
Michael Silverman of the Boston Herald caught up with former Red Sox prospet Ryan Westmoreland, whose promising career was cut short by a cavernous malformation in his brain. He just had his 16th surgery related to the issue on Monday.
My daughter and I both loved this photo essay from the BBC on the abandoned Ross Island in the Indian Ocean, which nature is slowly taking back, as it does.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, climate change, evolution, links, stick to baseball, vaccines, voter suppression

→ March 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/10/18.

I had two posts for Insiders this week, with another one on Shohei Ohtani just posted this morning. One piece looked at potential #1 overall pick Casey Mize, a right-handed pitcher at Auburn who threw a no-hitter last night. I ranked potential impact prospects for the 2018 season, which differs from my top 100 ranking, which looks at prospects’ long-term expected value. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Smile, a new, light card game designed by Michael Schacht, best known for Zooloretto.

The paperback version of Smart Baseball comes out on Tuesday! I’ll be at Twitter HQ that day, and will answer questions from readers via the site’s Q&A app. To submit a question, tweet it with the hashtag #smartbaseball.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Atlantic on a serial con man who bilked a dozen women out of $1 million by finding them on dating sites, establishing relationships with them, and then doing everything from using their credit cards to pawning their jewelry to stealing one woman’s passport and birth certificate.
Politico examines how the Obama administration’s decision to normalize relations with Myanmar may have led to the ongoing genocide of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, many of whom now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. The country, formerly known as Burma, made superficial moves towards democracy after decades of rule by a military junta, and the U.S. responded in kind by lifting sanctions, but in the process we never pushed for protections for threatened minorities, and still aren’t doing so.
The New York Times‘ news section remains excellent, as in this long profile of a once-promising dancer who ended up homeless in Manhattan, suffering from untreated mental illness. What the writer never seems to question or explore, however, is the link between the subject’s sexual abuse as a child and her mental illness as an adult.
Their opinion section remains a tire-fire, as anti-Arab troll Bari Weiss, who now writes for the NYT full-time, used a fake ‘antifa’ Twitter account as evidence for some point she was making.
Jane Coaston takes a long look for Vox at the current trial of several alt-right leaders for inciting violence in Charlottesville. Are they criminally liable for speech that the prosecution argues led to the death of Heather Heyer?
A new study in Science found that false news stories spread faster than true ones, because it’s more novel or interesting. They also found that bot accounts don’t spread false stories faster than true stories.
David Gorski, at Science-Based Medicine, goes long on the ‘unholy alliance’ in Texas between ultra-religious conservatives and anti-vaxxers to fight vaccine mandates under the bullshit guise of ‘choice.’ You have a choice not to give yourself medicine when you’re sick, because doing so only makes you an idiot. You do not have the choice to deny your children such treatments, nor do you have the choice to endanger vulnerable members of your community who can’t be vaccinated or who could die of vaccine-preventable diseases. If you live in Texas, speak up, assuming you’re not hospitalized with the mumps.
WIRED looks at our extremely vulnerable medical supply chain, as shown by how two hurricanes in Puerto Rico have led to a massive shortage of IV bags in the U.S. Too many drugs and supplies are made outside of the U.S., and, of course, the current Administration’s response to the disaster in Puerto Rico has been unacceptable.
An upcoming trial in Virginia (just postponed to May) will test an anti-abortion tactic of trespassing in abortion clinics to harass and obstruct patients seeking abortions or other related health services. I wonder what would happen if the abortion clinic employees invoked Stand Your Ground laws and shot the trespassers.
Cavaliers power forward Kevin Love wrote a piece for the Players’ Tribune about suffering a panic attack and the good that talk therapy has done for him since then. If you have mental health issues that aren’t trauma-induced, cognitive behavioral therapy can be a wonderful solution, or a major part of the solution.
WNYC’s On the Media podcast did an episode on how various reporters and outlets cover white supremacists. Is giving such racists and cranks publicity only helping them find new members?
An 83-year-old herbalist is now on trial in California for killing a 13-year-old diabetic boy by giving him herbs instead of insulin. The story doesn’t say if the mother is charged, but she should be.
Sinclair Broadcasting is taking over more and more local stations, and they’re forcing news anchors to read promos that bash mainstream media and report on right-wing bugbears like terrorism rather than cover local news.
Vaccines: There’s an epidemic of oral cancer in men, caused by the HPV virus, which men can catch while performing oral sex. The point of the article isn’t to tell me to make like Fat Joe, but to encourage parents to get their sons the HPV vaccine.
StatNews looks back at Albert Sabin, developer of the oral polio vaccine. He died 25 years ago this week and was lauded in his time for refusing to patent the new vaccine, thus making it cheap and affordable for patients around the world. With news that Nigeria appears to have gone a year without any new cases of polio, the disease’s wild form appears to be once again endemic in the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan and nowhere else.
Natural News, a pseudoscience site that trashes valid medicine so Mike Adams can sell you a bunch of useless supplements, was kicked off Youtube after posting videos arguing that the Parkland shooting survivors were just ‘crisis actors.’
GlobalNews looks at the spreading measles outbreak in Europe, which the authors trace back to the fraudulent Andrew Wakefield study that claimed the MMR vaccine caused autism (it doesn’t, no vaccines cause autism, and Wakefield fabricated the data).
Chefs and cooks are notorious for adopting a lifestyle that can be harmful to their long-term health. Kat Kinsman interviewed eleven chefs about their self-care routines.
The short documentary “Heroin(e),” which you can watch on Netflix, looks at three women in Huntington, West Virginia, the ‘overdose capital’ of the United States, who are trying to fight the tide of overdoses and opioid addiction. Vanity Fair looks at the film and story behind it.
High St. on Market is my favorite restaurant in Philadelphia, and now three alumni of the all-day café, built around their amazing house-made breads, are opening a new BYOB dinner-only restaurant called Cadence on the border of Fishtown and Olde Kensington.
LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold reviews the reopened Copenhagen restaurant Noma, often ranked as the best restaurant in the world.
The Irish Times looks at former billionaire Chuck Feeney, who gave his entire fortune to charity, mostly through his own foundation, which has wound itself down by using its endowment.
An ACLU-backed lawsuit accusing Kansas Klown Kris Kobach of voter suppression began this past week; the suit argues that the policy he crafted unfairly disenfranchised thousands of Kansans, and could do the same to a few million American voters if the law spreads. Two things you can do to fight this: Vote against politicians pushing voter suppression under the guise of “stopping voter fraud,” and get a passport.
Boardgame stuff: Designer Grant Rodiek argues that upcoming title Rising Sun is extremely important given the industry’s trend towards more complex games with overlong rulebooks or highly asymmetrical setups that can deter newbies to the hobby – and frankly just don’t have good designs.
Another designer, Bruno Faidutti (Citadels), writes about the flood of new releases every year and how it shrinks the selling windows for most games. I don’t think he has any answers, but his point, that 3000 new games a year probably isn’t sustainable for most publishers, is a real concern.
Restoration Games has updated its Design Diary for the upcoming Fireball Island, a reissue of a Milton Bradley title from 1986.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, con men, links, longreads, philadelphia, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 3, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/3/18.

I’ve had one Insider post in the last week, this one on the MLB Draft, looking at Florida starters Brady Singer and Jackson Kowar, as well as several other prospects from the Gators and the Miami Hurricanes. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Chris Crawford and I did an impromptu podcast previewing Sunday night’s Oscars, looking at about a dozen categories with our picks of who should win and our very-much-outsider guesses on who will win. It looks like a few hundred of you have already indulged us by listening and we both appreciate it.

Smart Baseball drops in paperback in just ten days! Buy copies or see more details on HarperCollins’ site.

And now, the links…

Long reads first: Harvard blew off sexual harassment charges against a notable professor in 1982, allowing him to remain on faculty to this day and apparently discouraging other women from coming forward. They know now, but haven’t even responded to this article that I can see.
The Guardian looks at the link between processed meats and cancer that appears to come from the use of nitrates and nitrites in curing, which the author argues is about color and flavor rather than safety.
I’m surprised anyone takes Turning Point USA, a college conservative front group for some major right-wing donors, seriously, but it seems that it took a man in a diaper to alert anyone to the group’s bizarre and unpopular stances.
The Washington Post looks at the problems that arise from testing huge backlogs of rape kits, including widespread misunderstandings of what law enforcement must do in such cases.
The Huffington Post has the scoop on how the New York Times’ editorial page is justifying itself to the rest of the staff. This piece just reinforced my decision to cancel my digital subscription.
Alex Pareene wrote more about this for Splinter, saying that Bennet lacks an important qualification for his job as the Times‘ editorial page head: He can’t seem to understand readers’ reactions to the columns he runs.
Matt Martin, who served as an infantryman in Afghanistan, argues eloquently that arming teachers is insane. I thoroughly agree and would not want my daughter in a school with weapons already present. The hilarious idea of installing metal detectors at school entrances and then putting weapons INSIDE the building can’t make sense to anyone but the manufacturers of guns and metal detectors.
Vox looks at the lack of evidence or research on emotional support animals.
How did Melanie Trump land an EB-1, informally called the “Einstein visa,” to stay in the US back in 2001? (My favorite conservabot response to this is “she speaks five languages!” Honey, in Europe, they call that “average.”)
Alt-right news outlets ran with the claim that CNN “scripted” questions in its town hall show on gun control after one of the kids involved claimed they rejected his question. He was lying, of course, but I haven’t seen many corrections from those same publications.
The Dallas Observer covers Rangers broadcaster CJ Nitkowski’s latest meltdown, including his denial that he knew he was following a white supremacist group & liking their tweets. By siding with Nitkowski, the Rangers and their TV partner Fox Sports Southwest have made their preferences quite clear.
Several “Instagram stars” have taken substantial steps to hide their connection to noted racist Pamela Geller, whose comments have been labeled “hate speech” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They’ve already lost a TV show on Verizon’s Oath channel, as a result of this piece and the discovery of anti-Islamic tweets they’d posted years ago. My main question: What on earth makes someone who just posts other people’s content an “Instagram star?”
Max Boot, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, decries the decline in the conservative movement from intellectual roots to “owning the libs.”
Researchers believe they’ve discovered the pathogen responsible for acute flaccid myelitis, which has caused hundreds of cases of polio-like paralysis in the last few years.
A new book details how yeast made modern civilization possible, even in foods and drinks you don’t associate with the fungi, like chocolate and coffee.
Two posts to prep you for Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony: a list of important “firsts” among this year’s nominations, and how a rule change may have screwed independent animated films – giving Boss Baby a nod over better but less-known features.
I don’t think I’ve ever linked to an advice column before, but this answer on how to deal with a classmate who won’t stop touching you (in a non-sexual but still non-consensual way) is excellent, and I think can be generalized to a lot of situations where someone is doing something that makes you uncomfortable.
Please enjoy this too-perfect mashup of Ratt’s Round and Round with Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bacon, food safety, food science, guns, harvard, links, science, stick to baseball

→ February 24, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/18.

I’m pretty stoked about the game I reviewed this week for Paste: Charterstone, a competitive, legacy game that incorporates so many great things from other games, plays in just an hour, and changes the board, cards, and rules in each play.

I had Insider posts on this week’s three-team trade (AZ, NYY, TB) and the JD Martinez signing. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! More details on the HarperCollins page for the book. List price is $16.99 but I imagine it’ll be less than that at many retailers.

And now, the links…

I posted this last Saturday night on Twitter, but it’s important enough to repost here: The BBC Inquiry podcast asks why is Cape Town running out of water? The reasons are obvious, yet authorities didn’t see this crisis coming, and the story has serious implications for cities in arid, warm regions around the world, including our own Phoenix and Tucson.
The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at the rise of Italy’s proto-fascist movement CasaPound. The country is expected to lurch to the right in elections in two weeks; incumbent leader Silvio Berlusconi, a corrupt lecher with endless political lives, has embraced the far-right to try to stay in office.
The Washington Post has a long article about Rachel Crooks, whom Trump sexually assaulted in a Trump Tower elevator in 2006.
Ben Lindbergh wrote a great profile of sabermetrics pioneer Sherri Nichols, whose Defensive Average was the first great public defensive metric (and changed the way I thought about how we discuss defensive values).
Twitter cracked down on a bunch of alt-right trolls, including hoaxers claiming the Parkland kids were ‘crisis actors,’ and their general counsel explained the moves in a thread that deserves more attention. Yes, Twitter needs to do more, but this sweep was a big step.
One of the kids targeted by these hoaxers directly responded to his accusers.
My alma mater’s alumni magazine interviewed Tom Nichols on the death of expertise and the public’s rising refusal to listen to people who actually know things.
Digg has a piece on a disease I’d never heard of, one that causes thousands of deaths each year with just a 50% survival rate: melioidosis, a.k.a. Whitmore’s disease, a bacterial infection endemic in southeast Asia and northern Australia.
Author, astronomer, and atheism advocate Lawrence Krauss has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, something that seems to be too common in the skeptic community (where Michael Shermer has also been accused of sexually harassing or assaulting multiple women). In a movement that prides itself on demanding and then accepting evidence, you’d think these women would find more support.
Pennsylvania Republicans are willing to dismantle the state’s democracy to retain power, moving towards impeaching the state judges who ruled against their gerrymandered map. They’re also suing yet again to stop the redistricting. One wonders what they’re so afraid of.
The great ProPublica gets a profile of how it’s taking its watchdog approach to Facebook, Google, and other tech giants.
Some good news on the vaccine front: Trump appears to have abandoned his vaccine-autism commission idea. The UK is having its own vaccine-denial problem, prompting the Guardian to also issue this editorial on how we need to hear parents’ fears, and make them immunize their kids anyway.
An Idaho group brought 183 small coffins to the Boise state house, one for each kid who died in the state because their parents were ‘faith healers,’ going back to 1970. You have a right to practice your religion, but you do not have the right to let your kids die for your faith. The latter is something you get with so-called “religious freedom” laws.
Kyle Lobner, formerly of BrewCrewBall, is starting a newsletter version of his Frosty Mug daily links roundups, aimed mostly at Brewers fans, and you can support his efforts via Patreon.
Sorry, but it turns out that Nigerians just don’t care about their bobsled team.
A brief post from the founder of the Environmental Voter Project argues that the NRA is effective because its voters show up, not because of money. The answer, of course, is to boost turnout of people opposed to the NRA’s agenda.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: guns, italy, links, metoo, science, south africa, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

→ February 17, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/17/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covered the top 30 prospects for this year’s MLB Draft, in advance of yesterday’s opening night in Division 1. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday. Unfortunately I did not recover enough from whatever ailment I had this week to make the trip to Myrtle Beach, but hope to be on the road next weekend.

I reviewed the board game Seikatsu, one of my daughter’s new favorites, here this week, with another review hitting Paste‘s site next week. Also, I never tweeted this link at all, but reviewed the Romanian-language film Graduation, from Oscar-nominated director Cristian Mungiu, on Wednesday.

Smart Baseball comes out in paperback on March 13th! Some readers have reported difficulty finding the hardcover version in stores, but it is still available on amazon at the moment.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Outline looks at Delaware’s opioid crisis, mentioning a high school in the district where we live (which has a local reputation for such things). Does any state not have an opioid crisis? And is there anything states can do to stop it without support from the federal government?
WIRED looks inside the last two years at Facebook as the company faces criticism from multiple sides for its part in promulgating fake news and, in the words of one former executive, “ripping apart the social fabric.”
Lawfareblog breaks down what the latest indictment from Robert Mueller’s office means — and what it doesn’t.
Buzzfeed talks to Aviv Ovadya, Chief Technologist at UMSI’s Center for Social Media Responsibility, about the imminent potential for technologies that can quickly create and disseminate new levels of fake news, including forged audio and video that could make it appear that world leaders said things they never said or did things they never did.
This November post from Rantt Media looks at how backpropagation, often mislabeled as “AI,” threatens millions of jobs, and what policy prescriptions we might enact to mitigate its effects. The idea that this is happening no matter what, so we should change our funding priorities, is very different from the “how do we stop this?” conversation that dominates instead.
An Indonesian province on the island of New Guinea that is home to the world’s biggest gold mine is home to a measles outbreak and widespread starvation among natives whose traditional environment and way of life has been destroyed by the mining companies with the full compliance of the Indonesian government.
Nigeria’s massive oil industry has long benefited foreign investors and a tiny local elite rather than enriching the country as a whole, which is the most populous country in Africa. The son of one of the country’s billionaires opened a window on how little the industry helps the Nigerian population when he tried to invest in European oil and gas assets, exposing how difficult it is for most Africans to participate in the wealth generated by natural resources. He’s no hero, but he inadvertently showed how badly the west takes advantage of former African colonies to this day.
EPA head Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier who is thoroughly unqualified to head the agency, has wasted tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on first-class travel … because taxpayers accost him over his disastrous policy decisions when he flies coach.
Have you seen tweets or reports that the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre was the 18th school shooting in the U.S. this year? It wasn’t. That number comes from a gun-control advocacy group that counts any gun-related incident on a school campus as a “school shooting,” even if there wasn’t a threat to students.
Of course, deaths by firearm are still one major reason the U.S. is the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born in.
This Paste op ed is from November but could run weekly without ever seeming out of date: Ban Assault Weapons, Idiots.
If you live in California, be aware that a group of cranks and pseudoscience advocates are pushing a ballot initiative to overturn the state’s mandatory vaccination law, remove fluoride from water, and more under the innocuous-sounding name “California Clean Environment.” All this would do is damage public health, especially for children, to satisfy a few charlatans who profit off the ignorant.
I know you’re shocked, but former Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has been accused of hiding profits from Miami-Dade County, claiming a paper loss on the sale of the team (for $1.2 billion) that let him avoid paying a portion of the proceeds to the county.
Cobb County ripped off its taxpayers to fund a stadium for the privately-owned Atlanta Braves … and now the county can’t even fund its existing libraries. The county also opened a new $10 million “cultural center” despite lacking a sustainable operating budget for the facility.
West Virginia is run by industries busy destroying its environment, including the oil & gas industry. A Democratic candidate in the state’s 7th District tried to read the names of sitting state legislators with how much money they received from oil & gas companies and was physically dragged from the floor, especially since she dared point out that committee chairman John Shott (GOP) took $40K from First Energy. How crooked is West Virginia’s government? The governor hired a gas company board member for an undefined role in the state house that gives him 24-hour access to the Governor’s Office.
Marie Newman is a Democrat running in Illinois for a seat held by another Democrat, Dan Lipinski, because Lipinski has supported so many right-wing positions, including voting for a 20-week abortion ban, voting to extend the government’s right to warrantless spying, voting for a permanent ban on the use of federal funds for abortions, voting against a minimum wage hike, and voting to expand the death penalty. Lipinski has long enjoyed the support of labor unions in his gerrymandered district, but several broke with him in the last three weeks to support Newman.
The songwriters behind the 2000 3LW song “Playas Gon’ Play” sued Taylor Swift over the lyrics to her song “Shake It Off.” She won … because the judge ruled that the lyrics in question were too unoriginal to warrant copyright protection. I think this adequately burns both sides.
The Washington Post hired Koch Brothers mouthpiece Meghan McArdle to write for its editorial page, even though she got caught fabricating data to support an argument against the Affordable Care Act.
That wasn’t even the worst editorial page move of the week; the New York Times seems determined to drive itself into a ditch with recent hires and columns, including the hiring-and-immediate-firing of neo-Nazi apologist Quinn Norton. Justin Charity wrote for the Ringer about the paper’s seeming desire for self-immolation. I cancelled my digital subscription on Monday over the paper’s decision to run a column from climate change denier Bret Stephens that claimed the world is “smearing” Woody Allen, whose stepdaughter says he molested her.
Researchers at Rockefeller University may have discovered a new class of antibiotic compounds by sifting through dirt. Malacidins were effective in laboratories against many multi-drug resistant Gram-positive bacteria, including MRSA, by binding to calcium compounds that would eventually go into bacterial cell walls.
You can retain new material you learn more effectively if you take a short break of doing absolutely nothing after studying it.
Board game news: Calliope Games announced the long-delayed arrival of its three new Titan Series titles, including Ancestree, on retail shelves. Ancestree was among the best light games I played at Gen Con last year; it’s from designer Eric M. Lang, best known for heavier games like Blood Rage and the forthcoming Rising Sun.
Bezier Games released Palace of Mad King Ludwig to retail about three weeks ago; it’s a standalone sequel to Castles of Mad King Ludwig, but dispenses with the earlier game’s odd shapes and now has all players working on the same building with square tiles of differing values. Bezier’s site still says “pre-order” but it’s on amazon for $43.
Gen Con ticket sales are already outpacing sales from last year, with the event, held August 2-5 in Indianapolis, on course for its second straight sellout. I intend to be there the whole time, as I was last year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board games, guns, links, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ February 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/10/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covers the Cubs signing Yu Darvish to a six-year deal. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the new, light strategy board game Majesty: For the Realm for Paste this week.

I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly now that the prospect work is over. Also, Smart Baseball will be out in paperback on March 13th; you can pre-order it on amazon or elsewhere, although at the moment the hardcover version is about $1 cheaper.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New Orleans Times-Picayune story on a photographer’s friendship with former NFL player Jackie Wallace, who has intermittently gone missing due to his ongoing substance abuse problems, is beautifully written and devastating at the same time.
This 20,000-word piece profiling the Resnicks, the biggest farmers in the United States, manages to touch on water shortages & fights, how companies treat their employees, and the marketing of food in a wide-ranging and brilliant article that doesn’t directly take sides.
A Georgia con artist failed to fulfill a FEMA contract to deliver hot meals to Puerto Rico and is now suing the agency for $70 million. Tiffany Brown had no disaster relief experience, but got the contract anyway, even though you can see on Yelp that she’s been accused of small-scale fraud.
The New Yorker looks at SHIFT, a massive, ongoing research project on sexual behavior on campus located at and funded by Columbia. The goal is to find small, structural changes they can make to student life to reduce the incidence of unwanted sexual contact.
Michael Lewis looks at the Trump Presidency from inside and without, including spending time with a thoroughly unchastened Steve Bannon, in a long piece for Bloomberg News.
Can technology help reduce the sugar in gelato and other desserts? More importantly, why would we want to?
The Asheville Citizen-Times reports on the huge rise in children entering foster care because their parents are hooked on opioids, a problem particularly affecting western North Carolina and other parts of the Appalachian Highlands. The issues range from infants born with up to eight different drugs in their systems to older children dealing with untreated or undertreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
Climate change may release tons of mercury into the atmosphere, well beyond previous projections, because permafrost soil – which may not be so “perma” after all – contains more of the metal than earlier estimates held.
A record number of scientists are running for office this year, spurred by the federal government’s unconscionable, irrational lurch towards denialist policies on everything from climate change to clean water.
Geothermal energy is gaining increased attention as a renewable energy source, which means the current Administration will likely target it with tax hikes and tell us more about “clean, beautiful coal.”
A Pennsylvania Republican is trying to impeach state Supreme Court justices who struck down the state’s gerrymandered map for Congressional seats. Cris Dush, who represents a rural part of western PA, says it’s not about their ruling, but their process. The state’s Democrat governor discussed the gerrymandering ruling with the Washington Post.
Pennsylvania is no isolated case; the Republican Party is benefiting from a long-range, planned effort to gerrymander states across the country to try to hold power in Congress even though they consistently lose the popular vote.
Want to hear a Polish joke? The country passed a law making it illegal to say Polish people collaborated with the Nazis, part of a rising tide of anti-Semitism across Eastern Europe. The country’s president signed the law, drawing a rebuke from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
An Alabama high school teacher compared Obama to Hitler and assigned an overwhelmingly conservative summer reading list, including Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.
Over 100,000 people protested in Athens … because they don’t like the name of the country Macedonia. I suppose in a country with a 21% unemployment rate, it’s not like these people have anything better to do.
Paul Ryan’s office tweeted about a woman thanking him for a tax cut that gave her an $1.50 a week … and then deleted it in the face of widespread criticism and mockery. The tax cut gave a disproportionate benefit to higher-income earners, even though it’s far from clear that this will do anything to stimulate the economy; there’s a competing school of thought that savings and/or consumption do more to drive growth.
Slate ran a junk-science article claiming backpackers don’t need to filter or treat stream water before drinking it; Discover had one of the best rebuttals of this nonsense, although it still wasn’t enough to convince Slate to correct or take down its post and the dangerous advice therein.
A publicly-funded college in Ontario is launching a diploma program in the pseudoscience homeopathy.
My current home state of Delaware reported its fourth flu death of the season last week, as new flu cases for the last full week of January were double those of the same week last year.
A Colorado man whose rape conviction was overturned after he spent 28 years in prison is suing the state … and the state’s Attorney General is fighting his $1.9 million request.
A new Kickstarter for the board game CO2: Second Chance, an update and reissue of a climate-change themed game from 2012, blew past its funding goal in the first few days last week.
Asmodee’s acquisition binge continued this week with the announcement that they’re acquiring Mayfair Games and Lookout Games. Mayfair, which announced it was shutting its doors after 36 years in business, was the longtime publisher of Catan, while Lookout published Uwe Rosenberg’s biggest titles, including Agricola and Patchwork.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, delaware, links, longreads, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball

→ February 3, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/3/18.

My org reports and top ten prospect lists for all 30 teams are now up for Insiders, which concludes this year’s prospect rankings package:

• NL East
• NL Central
• NL West
• AL East
• AL Central
• AL West

I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday.
I’ve been selling some of my board game collection and donating the proceeds to charity, including the Food Bank of Delaware and hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

With the prospects project done, I resumed my free email newsletter this past week. Also, the paperback edition of Smart Baseball comes out on March 13th; you can buy any of the editions through HarperCollins’ site.

And now, the links…

Damon Krukowski, formerly of the band Galaxie 500, has a long (and somewhat rambling) piece on the state of the music industry in the age of streaming, and how only the most popular artists are well served by the emerging model.
Undark looks at the debate over the debate over cell phone radiation safety, much of which hinges on the understanding of terms like “evidence” or “proof.”
Climate change is threatening coffee farms around the world; genetic engineering may be our best weapon to fight it, even though it’s a popular bogeyman of the anti-science crowd across the spectrum.
This piece was everywhere last weekend, but in case anyone missed it, the New York Times piece on the fake Twitter follower industry, in which they outed many heavy Twitter users who have bought followers – including former ESPN employee Britt McHenry, 90% of whose followers are ‘fake.’ (I have never bought any followers on any social media network, but I do have followers that independent sites tag as ‘fake.’)
Hackers from the Dutch intelligence service are a major reason we know about Russian interference in our elections.
The Sydney Morning Herald published an extract from an upcoming book about a tattooist at Auschwitz, a Slovakian Jew who becomes the camp’s Tätowierer to survive.
Stephanie Springer looks at pseudoscientific therapies on the rise in baseball, including “cupping,” which Bryce Harper has adopted.
The CEO of Oxfam America writes we must pass a real disaster relief package for Puerto Rico, and now. I can’t help wondering if Congress would move faster if Puerto Ricans 1) had actual votes in Congress 2) spoke English as their first or only language or 3) were white.
I’m a devoted Penzey’s customer because I think their spices and herbs are some of the best around, but it doesn’t hurt that they’ve taken a clear stand against bigotry and intolerance at a time when most companies avoid taking any kind of political stance.
NYC chef Elise Kornack writes about enforcing decency to make restaurants a better place for everyone.
Florida Representative Matt Gaetz brought a right-wing troll and Holocaust denier to the SOTU, and still brought him after he was informed of the man’s views.
The city of Philadelphia now has a daytime service center for the city’s homeless, including medical services for people with opioid addictions.
BBC Travel has a delightful photo/video essay on Monowi, Nebraska, population 1, the only incorporated municipality in the U.S. with just one resident.
The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank writes that Republicans have vacated their definitions of morality, accepting whatever Trump does and moving the line to condone it.
Paul Rosenzweig writes in the The Atlantic that dreams of Mueller indicting Trump are a fantasy, as it won’t be Mueller’s call to make.
There’s an unfortunate truth in this sarcastic rant: If Larry Nassar had been selling unauthorized T-shirts, Michigan State would have shut him down right away.
Farhad Manjoo argues in the NY Times that the online advertising model is the real problem with the modern Internet.
The Republican National Committee voted to define being transgender as “a disqualifying psychological and physical” condition, even though the American Psychological Association is clear that being transgender is not a mental disorder.
South Dakota Republicans have approved a bill out of a Senate committee to allow concealed carry without a permit.
Julian Assange is so desperate to help the GOP that he offered dope on Senator Mark Warner to a fake Sean Hannity Twitter account.
Also from Undark: Zooey Deschanel’s new web series peddles pseudoscience, even discouraging people who can’t afford organic produce – which is no more healthful for consumers than conventional – from buying certain fruits and vegetables at all.
Acram Digital, developers of the app versions of Eight Minute Empire and Martin Wallace’s Steam, announced that their next board game app will be the outstanding medium-weight strategy game Istanbul.
Eggerspiele announced their next release, Coimbra, a dice-drafting, heavy strategy game. (The link is in German but you can switch to English by clicking the flag in the upper right.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, links, organic agriculture, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

→ January 27, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/27/18.

My annual prospects package began this week, with about half of it running already and the rest to come next week:

• The top 100 prospects in baseball, split into two parts: numbers 1 through 50 and numbers 51 through 100
• A list of ten guys who just missed the top 100
• My ranking of all 30 farm systems (prior to the Yelich trade)
• My thoughts on the Christian Yelich trade, focusing on the prospects the Marlins got back

I also held a prospect-focused Klawchat on Thursday, answering about 150 questions. The team-by-team org reports will start to run on Monday, beginning with the NL East.

Over at Paste I reviewed Wasteland Express Delivery Service, which made my top ten games of 2017 list but hadn’t gotten the full breakdown.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Think Progress looks at Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, Seth Abramson, and other anti-Trump conspiracy theorists whose claims and prognostications have repeatedly been proven wrong.
ProPublica found that the Red Cross fired an exec for sexual harassment but helped him land a job at Save the Children. Do not give your money to the Red Cross the next time there’s a disaster, even if it’s as easy as texting a word. They won’t account for how they use funds, and this is just more icing on that cake.
Cambodian dictator Hun Sen is using Facebook to push fake news while he jails critics, including an extensive effort to game Facebook’s algorithms so sites favorable to him dominate the news feed.
The Guardian examines new technologies to help those who lose the ability to speak, including one Boston-based firm that records a person’s voice (such as prior to surgery that affects speech) to help recreate it digitally. So much of our identities are tied up things we think about every day – your hair color, your complexion, your height and weight – but your voice is probably not something you’ve considered because you expect to always have it.
Vanity Fair weighs in on the potential regulatory disaster facing Facebook as its power continues to grow … and some people opt out of one or more social media services. The Economist looks at the question from the regulators’ side, arguing that Facebook and Google resemble trusts and the law must adapt to this new environment (subscription required).
A proposed HHS regulation would allow doctors to hide behind religious beliefs when declining to treat patients because they’re transgender or need an abortion or any other cockamamie reason. You have a right to worship as you please; you do not have the right to refuse to serve a customer on that basis. This should be even more true for first responders, doctors, and nurses.
WIRED looks at Google’s internal battle over diversity, including attacks on trans & queer employees, as well as attempts to harm the careers of people who speak out in favor of diversity and/or against the kind of insidious bigotry in fired engineer James Damore’s memo.
The neo-Nazi behind the Daily Stormer site is trying to skate on charges of organizing threats against a Jewish woman in Monday by using Holocaust denialism as his defense.
David French writes in the National Review how Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. has beclowned himself with his tortuous, hypocritical defenses of Trump’s behavior.
Why is ICE asking people to prove their citizenship at a Bangor, Maine, bus station? Because they’re allowed to do so within 100 miles of any of our national borders. The ACLU is investigating. If you’re not at a border crossing, you do not have to disclose your citizenship or immigration status.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is defying state law by refusing to call for special elections to fill vacant seats in the state’s legislature. The people in these districts should be out in the streets demanding such elections, as they will otherwise be without representation until January 2019.
That’s not all Wisconsin Republicans are doing to try to cling to power; they’ve gerrymandered the state and passed laws to restrict voting rights, part of what Rolling Stone‘s Ari Berman calls a nationwide party attempt to rig elections (another longread). And ThinkProgress also uses the r-word in describing Trump & the GOP’s plan to make Congress whiter even as the population becomes less so.
Common Cause has filed a complaint alleging that hush money paid to Stormy Daniels violated campaign finance laws.
Northampton County, Pennsylvania, flipped to red in the 2016 Presidential election, and despite job losses in the area and no evidence of economic growth, most voters there still seem to support him, according to this Guardian piece.
Arizona voters in Trent Franks’ district will get one of these winners as the Republican candidate to replace him (video). The very first candidate to speak opens his remarks by bragging about his A+ rating from the Russian-funded NRA and saying teachers should carry weapons in schools, even though the question had nothing to do with school shootings; around 5:42, all five candidates say they don’t believe in human-caused climate change, with one dingbat blaming the sun and another moron saying the cold winter in the east (BTW, it’s 55 here today) disproves it. The primary for the special election will take place on February 27th, and the special election itself will occur on April 24th.
Despite a growing body of evidence that marijuana, or at least something in marijuana, may be useful in treating symptoms of PTSD, the VA is refusing to study any of this because of some reefer madness bullshit.
Missouri Senate candidate Courtland Sykes said women’s rights were nothing this week in a rant about how feminists have “snake-filled heads” and that he expects his girlfriend to have dinner ready for him every night. Did I forget to include his party affiliation?
Scientists from around the world collaborated on a paper that proposes redefining how research papers measure statistical significance, a response to another paper that argued for lowering the P-value required to use that term.
Jon Heyman wrote about how the Expos found the prospect Vlad Guerrero, talking to the scout who signed him off a brief tryout for a bonus of less than $10,000.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, first amendment, links, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ January 20, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/19/18.

I only wrote three things this week that you can see anywhere right now: Two posts for Insiders on the Andrew McCutchen trade and the Gerrit Cole trade; and a review of the movie Call Me By Your Name.

Everything else I wrote will go up next week as part of the top 100 prospects package. The top 100 itself is scheduled to run on Monday and Tuesday – I’m still working on the order – followed by the “just missed” column on Thursday and one page ranking all 30 farm systems on Friday, which means that last writeup will be more concise than last year’s. The org reports will run the week after. If you’re curious, I haven’t written anything besides the top 100 capsules yet. So, yeah, things are just great.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Guardian looks at a Youtube host who fought back against revenge porn posted by her ex and eventually won.
The Detroit News has a lengthy investigation into Michigan State’s role in covering up Larry Nassar’s serial abuse. It is quite clear that MSU President Lou Anna Simon needs to step down. ThinkProgress has a shorter piece identifying his enablers, many of whom are still in the jobs where they protected a known child molester.
ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ESPN the Magazine also published a detailed report on the many institutional failures that allowed Nassar to prey on teenaged and preteen girls for decades.
Aly Raisman gave a victim impact statement on Friday and she took no prisoners.
WIRED looks at the search for new antibiotics in a drug-resistant age, combining old searches in the soil with new techniques from metagenomics.
Also from the Guardian: A profile of Social Chain, a British “meme factory” that advises firms on creating content that will spread across social networks.
Business Insider goes into depth on Yale’s failures to handle sexual misconduct cases, with an assist in incompetence from the New Haven Police Department.
Tom Nichols writes for the Washington Post that the Trump presidency is damaging our entire democracy, including aiding extremists on the left who wish to control the Democratic party.
A Boston Globe investigation argues that the Maine Republican Party is behind anonymous attacks on opposing candidates, pushing fake and misleading stories that cost at least one candidate a likely electoral victory.
Some alt-right trolls clipped a talk given by psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker to make it appear that he was praising the people in that cesspool, and the edited video quickly spread through social media, a new example of the harm that such networks can do to our collective intelligence.
A new rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services would allow doctors to refuse to treat transgender patients and to otherwise hide behind claims of religion.
A supposedly “independent” watchdog group in Chicago called Project Six is actually bankrolled by the far right according to a joint investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Sun-Times.
The accusation against Aziz Ansari has spurred lots of thinkpieces, many of them terrible. I thought Vox’s piece gave a balanced, nuanced take on the story, which doesn’t fit neatly into the “sexual assault” or “harassment” buckets we’ve been filling to surfeit of late.
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, asks in an essay on the #MeToo movement, “Am I a Bad Feminist?“
Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible, argues in the other direction that women need to ‘get ugly’ and voice their anger, asserting their rights and continuing to force these uncomfortable conversations about how men treat women in our society.
NPR looks at Italy’s disappointing response to the #MeToo movement, as the largely Catholic country still adheres to the idea that victims must have deserved or provoked their assaults.
Somaliland, a self-declared independent country in the northern part of what the international community still recognizes as Somalia, passed a law outlawing rape and banning rapists from marrying their victims as a way to escape punishment, while also giving life sentences to rapists who give their victims HIV.
The NCAA answers to nobody, so this story shouldn’t surprise anyone: A college basketball player player who was expelled from Findlay College after a false rape accusation was denied a waiver to play for Duquesne because the NCAA rules by divine right.
Billboard looks at the legal questions behind Radiohead’s copyright infringement claims against Lana del Rey.
The Four Barrel Coffee saga continues to twist, as the owners announced a name change and plans to become an employee-owned company, then a decision to keep the Four Barrel name, and a settlement to the harassment lawsuit that brought the company’s unacceptable environment to the light.
A Tempe “naturopath” (a practitioner of pseudoscience) is suing a blogger who called out her bogus claims about healing cancer, which include injecting cancer patients with vitamin C and baking soda, telling them to go sugar-free, and other stuff that won’t work … while also telling them not to undergo chemo or radiation therapy. The lawsuit is clearly a SLAPP attempt, and you can donate to the blogger’s defense fund set up by the Australian Skeptics. Noted debunker Orac calls the naturopath’s suit “legal thuggery.”
Greater than Games is running a series of raffles and promotions for their Multiverse Month. The publisher’s main titles include Bottom of the 9th, Sentinels of the Multiverse, and Spirit Island.
I can’t figure out if food writer Tamara Adler’s diary is real or satire, because if it’s real, it’s the most pretentious thing I’ve read in years.
At the Gates, one of the founding acts of the Gothenburg school of melodic death metal, announced its new album will be released in May. To Drink from the Night Itself will be the band’s first record without founding guitarist Anders Björler.
And finally, a video I rather enjoyed from Twitter:

?#PositiveNewsWeekend

I love these Strandbeests: wind-propelled kinetic sculptures created by Dutchman Theo Jansen. #art #beach #animals #fun pic.twitter.com/0fIsmpVnQx

— Alexander Verbeek ? (@Alex_Verbeek) January 13, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, links, metoo, Music, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

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