links — Page 31

→ June 3, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/3/17.

My second first-round projection (mock draft) went up on Tuesday, and I held a Klawchat, in which some guy got mad at me for answering a question about my first-round projections by including that link, on Friday. It’s bad enough civility is dead, but must we continue to mutiliate its corpse?

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the light detective/puzzle game Watson & Holmes, yet another game that uses those public-domain characters strictly for marketing purposes. It’s not a bad game, though, just a little too simple.

I’m told that Smart Baseball continues to sell well, although the sales figures I get mean nothing to me (since it’s my first book), but it wouldn’t hurt if you bought a dozen more copies to give out for Father’s Day to … um … your twelve fathers. Feel free to sign up for my email newsletter as well.

And now, the links…

I tweeted this one earlier in the week but it’s worth a second boost: Child marriage is still legal in Florida and several other states. As I read the Delaware statute (note: I’m not a lawyer) I think it’s technically legal here too, whereas the author of that op ed is arguing for it to be explicitly banned.
A professor at Evergreen State College has been the target of protests and threats of violence for challenging a campus tradition that, this year, asked white students and faculty to leave campus in a day of forced segregation.
Tasting Table dissects the Philly staple, the roast pork sandwich, including the best of the breed, the version at High Street on Market, with house-made bread and fermented broccoli rabe.
Why is east Africa starving while corn silos in South Africa are overflowing? Because most African countries, including hard-hit Kenya, ban imports of GMO corn. Fear of science is actually killing people.
What is it about Haruki Murakami that mesmerizes people? I found his two best novels, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, to be just that – mesmerizing, like reading your way into a dream-state – but everything before and after those two has left me flat.
The Ringer talked to the four actors who played The Kids in season four of The Wire.
A study published last August found that some cases of ‘untreatable’ depression were tied to metabolic deficiencies and could be treated with supplements, some as common as folate.
Legendary tech writer Walter Mossberg, who spent many years as the technology reviewer-critic for the Wall Street Journal, is retiring and wrote his final column for Recode.
This Atlantic piece from a month ago is the best explanation I’ve found of ESPN’s layoffs and changing business model. Our revenues are driven by cable subscriptions, and as people cut cable, entirely or partially (me), it’s going to reduce the revenues of every cable station. So, no, this isn’t about the white nationalists’ claims that ESPN itself is a leftist entity.
Into the swamp: Jared Kushner used a federal loan program aimed at helping poor, job-starved areas to build a luxury skyscraper.
HHS Secretary Tom Price enriched himself by buying drug stocks and pushing policies to help those companies.
The Administration appointed Nantworks CEO Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong to a health information technology advisory committee. He has a history of rigging donations to fuel the money back to his company and accused media reporting on his company’s revenue troubles of pushing fake news.
Although this Washington Post story purports to discuss fake news coming from within the White House, I think the real message is how supporters of this Administration choose to believe only what they wish to believe. Anonymous sources are fine if they tell you what you wanted to hear; otherwise, they’re “fake news.” You see this with science deniers and conspiracy theorists (people who call themselves “truthers” withou a trace of irony) too.
“Auntie” Maxine Waters has become a hero to the online (so-called) resistance, but they are conveniently forgetting her history of corruption allegations.
How on earth did a prep school teacher work for four schools in six years despite accusations of sexual misconduct at three of them? Rhetorical question, of course: Schools didn’t and still don’t report this stuff to future employers.
The New York Times axed its ‘public editor’ this week and, really, when they run garbage this puff piece on “wellness” charlatan Amanda Chantal Bacon, it’s hard to understand what that person was doing in the first place.
An autistic writer penned this piece in February about the irresponsibility of speculation around whether Barron Trump is on the spectrum. I don’t think such speculation is remotely fair or warranted, but it resurfaced this week with the totally unverifiable story that Barron thought Kathy Griffin’s (offensive) photo of her holding a fake, bloody Trump head was real.
I thought this story about Melania Trump and the wife of the Israeli President was a rare glimpse into the humanity of someone who, fairly or not, is painted as a mere trophy wife.
Oklahoma’s budget crisis has many schools dropping to just four days a week of classes. Both Oklahoma and Kansas are run by far-right Republican Governors who’ve helped drive their states off the fiscal cliff, and who’ve widely expanded publicly-funded charter schools at the apparent expense of traditional public schools.
This seems like a big deal – the FDA just approved the first cancer-fighting drug tied to a specific biomarker in the tumor. Previous cancer drugs were all targeted to a type of cancer – lung, skin, blood – defined by its original location in the body.
I’ll end with this.

For some international perspective on the Paris Accord, this is from Australia's @theage. pic.twitter.com/lAnaxWKT1T

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 2, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: gmo, links, mental illness, murakami, philadelphia, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, the wire

→ May 27, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/27/17.

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ May 20, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/20/17.

My one baseball post this past week was the annual ranking of the Top 25 MLB players under 25, which causes more “read the intro” violations than anything else I write every year. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday while in Minneapolis; I will do a quick eats post from there soon, but I’m about six topics behind here due to travel and lack of sleep.

For Paste, I reviewed the new puzzle game Shahrazad, which has a solo version and a two-player mode, both pretty clever with fantastic artwork and very few rules to learn.

My book, Smart Baseball, came out on April 25th from HarperCollins in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats. I traveled to Atlanta and the Twin Cities for readings/signings this past week, and am very grateful to all of you who came out to buy the book, have yours signed, or just say hello; we had 50+ folks at each event and Moon Palace Books sold out of the book Thursday night. Smart Baseball also got a very positive review from an unexpected source, the political site The Federalist.

I’m still sending out my email newsletter when I can, and the last edition, about some recent troubles I’ve had with my anxiety disorder and the medication I take for it, got the strongest response yet – so many replies and comments, in fact, that I haven’t been able to respond to the majority of them. I did see them all, though, and I really appreciate all the kind words.

And now, the links…

I’ll start with a baseball article. Russell Carleton, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Georgia on Tuesday night, wrote for Baseball Prospectus about why the increase in home runs doesn’t mean the ball is juiced. OK, but you’ll never convince me 1987 was legit.
How a paper purporting to prove ESP is real shows scientific research has a methodology problem. The credibility of much published research, especially in social sciences, is at stake.
If you live in Florida, Indiana, Alabama, or any state considering a so-called “academic freedom” bill, those are just backdoor creationism bills that would allow teachers the “freedom” to teach bullshit in science classes. Make yourself heard: these laws are wrong, damaging, and possibly unconstitutional.
Read about voters actually disenfranchised by voter ID laws in Wisconsin, along with quotes from sleazy politicians who blithely promised no registered voters would be denied their legal right to vote.
You probably saw The Atlantic article, published posthumously, called My Family’s Slave. You can put me in the camp of people who found the author’s tone and words troubling, and I recommend this Twitter thread for some well-articulated thoughts on the article’s many problems. Here’s my biggest one: Why didn’t he go to the police once he realized his parents were keeping Lola in involuntary servitude?
A new study shows that NSAIDs, including Advil (ibuprofen) and Aleve (naproxen), are correlated with a small but significant increase in heart attack risk, even with just moderate use.
You may have seen me refer to the Dunning-Kruger effect, especially when I’m talking to vaccine denialists on Twitter, saying that they suffer from this “illness.” Here’s a good lay piece on the phenomenon, which refers to people overestimating their knowledge or abilities under certain circumstances.
This USA Today profile of Chris Cornell, who took his own life this last week, was the best I found on the singer/songwriter.
A reader of mine sent along this post from a family member, a woman who was sexually assaulted at Case Western Reserve and who discovered that the university chose to settle a suit by her rapist that may allow him to return to campus.
Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard Law School wrote that Trump must be impeached … and that was May 13th, a full week ago, before the laundry list of revelations about his obstruction of investigations into his campaign’s ties to Russia.
Two days later, the Washington Post revealed that the President had revealed classified intelligence to Russian emissaries, which kicked off a cavalcade of revelations about POTUS and his cronies. The Lawfare blog had the best breakdown of that first story.
House Republicans are targeting programs that help disadvantaged Americans for budget cuts, including food stamps and benefits for veterans. I’d personally enjoy seeing the reaction from veterans’ groups to such a proposal.
A white lawyer in southern California is leading the charge to get people of color adequate representation on city councils. California may be among the most progressive states overall, but there’s a lot of garden-variety racism in local jurisdictions.
The Department of Justice is resorting to authoritarian tactics to get retribution against lawyers who helped fight their ill-conceived, xenophobic Muslim ban in January.
The FDA, a regulatory agency that suffers from serious mission creep, is considering a draft proposal that recommends quackery like acupuncture and chiropractic “medicine,” neither of which has any hard evidence proving efficacy.
Liberals, leftists, and just plain old never-Trumpers need to stop promoting bullshit conspiracy theories found on social media, promulgated by non-journalists and attention-seekers like Louise Mensch.
North Carolina Republicans are proving themselves to be the scum of American politics, between gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, a law that effectively legalized discrimination against LGBTQ residents, and now a 3 a.m. maneuver to strip education funding from Democrats’ districts. I used to love North Carolina and we thought several times about relocating there. Not any more.
New Jersey Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-11) outed an activist in his district in a letter to her employer, a move that, while legal, is ethically questionable given his position. The weekly protests at his office saw a boost this week, and the seat is no longer considered safely Republican for 2018.
That last bit sounds great if you’re against Trump & Co., but the Democrats are struggling to win the three special elections coming up to fill House seats, clear opportunities to take advantage of the President’s historic unpopularity.
A NY Times editorial asks is it time to move to Norway?, but the headline doesn’t really do the piece justice.
The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles English Professor Seth Abramson and his crusade against Trump, along with explanation of how he’s promoted his content so aggressively, the mixed nature of his messages, and why Twitter is a poor venue to persuade others.
A research paper by a Harvard Professor of Public Policy found no evidence that Lebron James’ relocations helped the economies of Cleveland or Miami. In Miami, there was no evidence of any economic boost; in Cleveland, there was a statistically significant uptick, but only very close to the arena itself, not to the metro area as a whole (which may be substitution rather than actual economic growth).
Paper book sales are up and ebook sales are down, and The Guardian speculates that increased production quality in physical books is one reason.
The competition to create a vegan burger that looks and feels like meat is increasing with the new entry from Impossible Foods, a startup with nearly $200 million in venture backing. If one of the criticisms of beef is the environmental cost of raising cows, shouldn’t this article consider the cost of producing these fake-meats, which includes “producing vats of it in a lab by mixing genes in soybeans with yeast,” then adding “heme … to wheat and potato proteins with coconut oil.” That’s a lot of processing and probably a lot of energy input.
Here’s Illinois Representative Darin LaHood (R-18) blatantly lying about the Trumpcare bill’s treatment of preexisting conditions in a message to constituents:
This sculpture/art installation in Venice, designed to raise awareness of the dangers of climate change, just makes me think of some giant sea monster coming to kill us all.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, books, environment, health, links, mental illness, science, vegan

→ May 13, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/13/17.

My one Insider post this week was my first ‘mock’ draft for 2017, although it’s really too early for that sort of exercise. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Smart Baseball is out now in the U.S. and Canada; you can order it here or get it at any local bookstore. We are working on getting an ebook version out in some international markets, but I can’t promise anything there yet.

I have two signings/talks this week, for which I’m very excited (and a little anxious, to be honest). The first is in Decatur, Georgia (Atlanta area), at the Georgia Center for the Book on Tuesday at 7 pm, and the AJC was kind enough to lead their book events page with a note about my appearance. The second is in Minneapolis at Moon Palace Books on Thursday at 6:30 pm. I hope to meet many of you at these events, both of which are free to attend.

I’ve been asked by many of you about organizing other events. If a bookstore reaches out to Harper Collins to invite me, and I can work it into my schedule, I’m certainly open to doing more. I do have further events scheduled for Toronto, Miami (July 8th), and Berkeley (July 19th), plus am hoping to do signings at GenCon and PAX Unplugged later this year.

I spoke with SUNY-Oswego Professor of Digital Media Brian Moritz about the book, analytics in sports, and being a writer. I joined The Young Turks’ video show to discuss the book and media resistance to advanced stats. I also spoke with ESPN Radio in Dallas, with ESPN 1530 in Cincinnati, and with SI Now about the book & Mike Mussina’s Hall of Fame case.

And now, the links…

The best thing I heard this week was NPR’s half-hour program looking back at the riots in LA after the Rodney King verdict.
TIME is running a series on the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that’s worth your time. I’ve said a few times that the #1 reason I buy organic dairy and eggs is to avoid contributing to the overuse of antibiotics in livestock.
A Nature editorial argues we need standardized language around antibiotic resistance to help combat the problem.
“Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care,” said GOP Representative Raul Labrador in a quote that will one day go on his tombstone. But it turns out people with C. Difficile infections often don’t get medication because of lack of funds, even though the drug (vancomycin) is available as a generic. (Abstract only; article requires subscription.)
Dr. Chad Hayes explains why anti-vaxxers who demand double-blind studies are delusional, if not outright cruel. Such studies would violate basic medical ethics.
Norway is reopening a 46-year-old cold case around the murder of a still-unidentified woman who’d been traveling in the country with numerous passports and aliases.
The New York Times has been producing some great journalism this year … and some absolute trash, like an editorial by the head of an anti-abortion group that relied on pseudoscience and didn’t properly identify the author’s role with that organization, which runs “crisis pregnancy centers” that primarily exist to try to deter pregnant women from getting abortions, and has called abortion “the worst holocaust in human history.”
And then the Grey Lady comes back with Tim Egan’s strong editorial asking who will save our republic, a call to Republicans to stand up against the ongoing battle between the Administration and the Constitution.
A West Virginia journalist was arrested for yelling questions at HHS Secretary Tom Price. Did he break the law by trying to get past security? Or was this a violation of our right to a free press?
The failed state of Venezuela continues its downward spiral, a story with real implications for MLB and hundreds of players in organized baseball. The latest protest saw police pepper-spraying a “grandparents March” in Caracas.
VICE Sports goes back to how the Timberwolves drafted a 27-year-old player in Qatar over Isaiah Thomas, a bizarre story that reminded me of the old days of MLB teams giving large signing bonuses to Dominican players who’d faked their ages and even names.
Reading more books is good for your brain. I knew I wasn’t just wasting my time! This Quartz piece reviews seven tips to increase your reading output, although I’d say tips 1 and 2 are by far the most valuable. (Also, it’s cute that they hold up Bill Gates reading 50 books a year as amazing.)
A North Carolina reverend and political activist told NPR that the recent executive order on “religious freedom” is just thinly disguised religious bigotry.
Texas, continuing its own downward spiral, is now considering a bill that would allow adoption agencies to reject gay or non-Christian couples, even if they receive state funding, under the guise of “religious freedom.”
Iowa Republican Congressman Rod Blum walked out in the middle of a scheduled interview because he didn’t like the questions. He’s under fire for voting for the Trumpcare bill even though it appears his constituents don’t (or may not) support it.
Is American capitalism inherently anti-innovation? And are the ongoing cuts to government-funded research killing our economy’s capacity to innovate? I don’t know, although I wish the author hadn’t used Juicero as a jumping-off point for his arguments.
Can other countries replicate Germany’s success in retaining manufacturing jobs? The differences between their culture of innovation and skills development and ours are stark.
Three classic Atari videogames will be adapted as boardgames within the next year, although I’m not sure how these solo games will work in cardboard.
Goofy fun: mental floss looks at eleven bizarre international borders, including the famous Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog borders where a town is split between Belgium and the Netherlands, but not by anything resembling a straight line. (And yes, they flipped East & West Germany in one of the graphics.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, boardgames, Economics, links, science, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ May 6, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/6/17.

Smart Baseball is out! Buy it here or at any local bookstore. It’s available in the US and Canada, in print, ebook, and audiobook forms. I have inquired about distribution elsewhere in the world but I can only report that we’re looking into it and nothing is imminent.

My one piece for Insiders this week covered the very limited market for Eric Hosmer this upcoming winter, given his lack of production and how few teams have openings at first or DH. I held a Klawchat, a bit shorter than normal, on Thursday.

I did an interview with the folks behind the Pocket bookmarketing app, and appeared on the public radio program AirTalk, both to talk about Smart Baseball. I also spoke with ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap on his radio show The Sporting Life.

* Anti-vaxxers have targeted Somali immigrants in Minnesota and caused a measles outbreak there. While I understand that we try not to criminalize speech here, how is this – claiming vaccines cause autism, a bad hypothesis fully debunked by science – any different than shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, causing needless panic and great public harm? (And yes, the Holmes quote is itself problematic, and he started walking it back almost immediately.) And why do we permit Wakefield to operate in the U.S.? We could easily deny him entry; he’s a greater threat to the broader population than suspected Islamic militants.

* George Will dropped two strong columns this past week for the Washington Post. The one you might have seen says the President has “a dangerous disability” and calls him unfit for office. The one you might have missed argues for repealing the mortgage interest tax deduction, which costs the US government about $100 billion annually in foregone revenues. This is an unpopular and controversial proposal; passing it would cause a one-time hit to housing prices and put many people underwater on their loans. But the exemption amounts to a regressive tax, and at the very least we should limit such deductions to primary residences (not second or third houses).

* Will’s column about the President came a few days after the vulgar talking yam was inconsistent and even incoherent after a long day of interviews. Remember when he questioned whether Hillary Clinton would have the stamina to be President? That was fun.

* Dion Walters of the Miami Heat wrote a hilarious and poignant piece for the Players Tribune at the end of April, which I missed because it went up the day Smart Baseball was released.

* NPR wrote about northerners flying the Confederate flag while openly denying that it is a racist symbol that stood for and will always stand for slavery. If one of my neighbors put one up outside his house and refused to remove it, I’d take it down by force. It’s no better than flying a flag with a swastika.

* While driving around southern California this week, I spent a lot of time listening to the indispensable NPR One app, which brought me some great stories and several episodes of a new podcast, The Grift, which I highly recommend. Two stories I liked enough to share: how the autocratic state government in Texas is destroying local government powers, and on the development of the Cosmic Crisp apple in Washington, which might be the next big hit apple with consumers.

* An epidemiologist explains why science is never perfect – that studies nearly always have some sort of flaws or biases, but that those don’t invalidate the results or make the studies worthless (a common claim of deniers like anti-vaxxers).

* How’s this for a bad headline. Something called the “Washington Free Beacon” wrote that a Democratic Congressional candidate in Montana said climate change deniers should kill themselves. What he actually said: “If any those of you that feel like this is not a problem, I challenge you to go into your car in your garage, start your car, and see what happens there.” This is obviously a ham-handed and scientifically weak attempt to point out the effects of burning fossil fuels on our atmosphere. But hey, gotta get dem clicks.

* ThinkProgress’ Lindsay Gibbs weighs in on the myth that ESPN is “liberal” simply because we argue against domestic violence or discrimination.

* Speaking of which, those liberal firebrands at Consumer Reports write that the Affordable Care Act led to a decline in personal bankruptcies.

* Someone in Russia is blinding Putin’s opponents with chemical attacks. It can’t happen here, though, right?

* You’ve probably seen the outrage among scientists that the New York Times hired a climate-change denier, Bret Stephens, in the name of “balance.” Did you also catch their publication of a bogus story on “alternative” medicine? Remember: There is no “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine. Otherwise, it’s bullshit.

* The passage of the AHCA, with many Congresspersons voting for it against the wishes of their constituents, has led to some direct financial results already:

In less than 24 hrs since #AHCA vote:

– Daily Kos raised $800k
– ActBlue raised $500k
– SwingLeft raised $500k

To fund GOP challengers

— laura olin (@lauraolin) May 5, 2017

* The Washington Post explains why that organic milk you bought might not be organic. The USDA’s organic labeling program has been a total failure, one of many examples where that agency has raised costs and wasted taxpayer money with no benefit to consumers. FWIW, I do buy organic milk because I want to support antibiotic-free husbandry, and “organic” is a fair proxy for that, but I don’t think the claimed health benefits of milk from grass-fed cows are proven.

* The James Beard Restaurant/Chef Awards are out! The winners include former Top Chef contestant Sarah Grueneberg, who won Best Chef: Great Lakes; her restaurant, Monteverde, provided one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten when I visited last July.

* This piece exhorting us to stop using public wifi networks makes sense, but is not terribly practical. Mobile data remains expensive and can’t match wifi speeds. The solution would seem to lie in making such networks more secure for most uses – although logging into your bank or credit card accounts on those networks will always be a bad idea.

* A new bill in Hawai’i’s legislature is essentially a sweetheart giveaway of state land rights to private tenants.

* Author/writer/Twitter wit Kelly Oxford discusses coming to terms with her panic disorder in an excerpt from her new book, When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments.

* The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf argues that smugness isn’t a liberal characteristic, but a universal one. People at either extreme can veer into condescension of those with opposing views. Of course, the targets of condescension may have earned such disdain if they’re spouting conspiracy theories or outright falsehoods; treating cranks with respect isn’t going to accomplish anything either.

* If you live in Florida and believe convicted felons who have completed their jail terms should regain their rights to vote – as they would in 40 other states – there is a petition you can sign and group you can join to try to help make that a reality.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, links, organic agriculture, stick to baseball, top chef, vaccines, voter suppression

→ April 30, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/30/17.

My book is out! You can find Smart Baseball absolutely everywhere – online, in bookstores, and even in some libraries. HarperCollins has links to various online vendors, but if you prefer to walk into a bookstore like it’s 1947 and buy the book directly, well, I like to do that too. I know thousands of you have already bought it, so my thanks to all of you.

I went to MLB Network on Friday and appeared on MLB Now, the show hosted by my friend and former ESPN colleague Brian Kenny. You can watch our discussion of the book. I talked to SI’s Richard Deitsch about baseball on TV and about not sticking to sports on social media. I also appeared on my good friend Will Leitch’s podcast to talk about the book and mock his hatred of Fletch.

I also discussed the book on over 50 radio shows this week; highlights included a long chat with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate, talking to Connell McShane on the Don Imus show, appearing on the Felske Files podcast, appearing on the Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast (with Karabell! But no bias cat), talking to WBAL’s Brett Hollander, and talking to WABC’s Sid Rosenberg.

I do have some upcoming appearances as well: May 8th at Pitch Talks Philadelphia, May 16th at The Georgia Center for the Book (in Decatur), and May 18th at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis. There are further readings/events scheduled in Toronto, Miami, and Brooklyn for June and July.

My other writing from the past week included ranking the top 50 prospects for this year’s draft for ESPN Insiders, a list I’ll eventually expand to 100. It wasn’t easy getting to 50, though. For Paste I ran through the best new boardgames of 2017, including a few titles from the tail end of last year.

OK, finally, let’s get to some links:

Longread of the week: Nathan Fenno of the LA Times looks at how Rays prospect Brandon Martin went from first-rounder to accused murderer. Martin was a legit prospect, briefly, but cocaine use and what sounds like undiagnosed mental illness led him to murder three people, including his own father.
Another great longread: Buzzfeed looks at the twice-convicted fraudster who has access to Trump via Mar-a-Lago because the con artist’s wife is the guest reception manager there.
The Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into Russian interference in our 2016 election is an understaffed, underequipped joke.
I’ll be watching the STARZ adaptation of American Gods tonight; in advance of that, Pacific Standard interviewed author Neil Gaiman about the series and its unexpected political relevance.
SNL insiders consider Kenan Thompson, now in his 14th year on the show, its most important cast member. I thought the quotes from castmates, writers, and producers were interesting given Thompson’s limited profile beyond the show.
A woman who briefly worked for Fyre Festival says it was always going to be a disaster.
Scientists claim to have created a fluid with “negative mass.” What I, a non-scientist, couldn’t grasp here is whether they actually did that, or created a supercooled fluid that behaved the way we would expect a fluid with negative mass to behave. Those aren’t the same thing, I think.
Mina Caputo, the longtime lead singer of metal band Life of Agony (with some interruptions), discussed coming out as transgender in the metal community with Rolling Stone.
I know you’re shocked, but our dear leader didn’t think through that whole border wall plan, since the land on which it would be built can’t support it.
Mother Jones proposes an alternate, “ecotopia” wall zone between the countries, which is really a rather witty troll job.
Under President Turnip’s tax plan, most of us would be better off becoming LLCs rather than individuals. The plan to cut the tax rate on corporations would allow the highest earners to register (and work) as LLCs and drop their marginal rate from 39% to 15%. Also, the real money quote: “After Kansas eliminated its state tax on pass-through income, the number of people taking advantage of the exemption soared, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for state coffers.” Kansas is run by idiots, which doesn’t say much for the people who voted them into office.
North Carolina Republicans, not satisfied with blocking legal protections for LGBT residents, have pushed through multiple bills aimed at suppressing the vote. If you live there, and any of your state reps are Republicans, you should be calling them daily.
Meanwhile, in Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe has restored the voting rights of over 150,000 felons – rights they would never have lost in many other states.
The governor of Kentucky won’t say who owns the house where he lives, a property that was sold in March for a price below its assessed value. The lack of disclosure mirrors the current federal Administration’s refusal to reveal potential conflicts of interest.
I won’t even pretend I followed this entire argument/spat over the “hot hand” theory in sports, although I think the 49/99 argument therein is merely a fancier application of the gambler’s fallacy. (The argument goes, if we expect a coin to turn up heads on 50 out of 100 flips, and the first flip is heads, then the expectation for the remaining 99 flips should be 49, not 49.5. I don’t agree with this, but given the behavior of some of this spat’s participants, I’m staying right here in my safe space.)
My alma mater’s Harvard Business Review has a strange piece arguing everyone should have at least two careers. On the one hand, yes, you can build and use your network to find untapped applications for your skills or even develop new ones. On the other hand, how many people have this kind of free time?
If you’ve ever used the site or app unroll.me, stop immediately because they’re selling your private data to Uber.
PBS Frontline aired a new documentary on what fish you should eat if you care about both your health and eating sustainable species. It’s not an easy question, and as the author and star of the documentary says, we need to find an answer if we expect to feed the planet.
The UN named Saudi Arabia, a country where women can’t drive and have fewer civil rights than a field mouse, the chair of its Women’s Rights Commission.
This is from 2013, but I stumbled across it last week: Allen Barra, who has also written quite a bit about baseball, wrote a piece in The Atlantic in praise of the novel At Swim-Two-Birds, one of my favorite novels ever.
Fortune profiles a startup that uses a spray made from discarded food that claims to keep fresh produce from spoiling, at least long enough to get it to distant markets. I would think that, if it works, this could also allow farmers in areas with less access to modern transportation to sell to export markets.
This tweet from a climate researcher went viral this past week:

Why I cancelled my @nytimes subscription. @BretStephensNYT pic.twitter.com/A3lFZNJdhY

— Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) April 27, 2017

I am a NY Times digital subscriber, but I can’t say I see any value in including a science-denier in the name of “balance.” The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple is similarly unimpressed.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, fish, links, metal, physics, smart baseball, stick to baseball, tv

→ April 22, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/22/17.

Smart Baseball comes out on Tuesday, so this is the last stick to baseball post before its official release. If you haven’t preordered yet, you can still do so here, or by, you know, walking into a bookstore and asking them to preorder it for you.

The media push for Smart Baseball has begun, with my hourlong chat with Joe Posnanski on his podcast, including talk about the book, boardgames, and how Mike Schur is dead wrong about pies. The Baltimore County Public Library interviewed me about the book and asked about time management. I also answered some questions in an interview for AM New York.

I currently have signings/appearances scheduled for Philadelphia (May 8th), Atlanta (May 16th), Minneapolis (May 18th), Toronto (June 26th), and Miami (July 8th). There are a few more in the works, including a likely signing at GenCon in Indianapolis, but if you don’t see your city on there, contact your local bookstore and ask them to contact HarperCollins. It’ll depend on my travel schedule, of course, but I do have time for a few more of these.

I wrote one draft blog post this week on Vandy’s Kyle Wright and Jeren Kendall, with notes on some Florida players as well. For Paste, I reviewed the epic boardgame The Colonists, which is actually a good game but punishingly intricate.

As always, you can get even more Klaw by signing up for my email newsletter.

And now, the links…

The best longread of the week was the Guardian‘s remembrance of comedian and writer Harris Wittels, who coined the term “humblebrag” and was a writer on Parks & Recreation who appeared a few times as Harris the idiot animal control guy.
Also great if somewhat hard to swallow: The Stranger‘s Ijeoma Oluo interviews Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who says she “identifies” as black, and comes off here as, to be kind, nuts.
I also enjoyed this look at F. Scott Fitzgerald and his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon.
Worth remembering: in 2015, Mother Jones revealed that Bill O’Reilly had lied about his experiences reporting on the Falkland Islands War.
Most of the world’s greatest restaurants rely on unpaid labor in the form of “stagiaires,” essentially interns who work grueling hours for no pay just to get the experience of working in a prestigious restaurant for an acclaimed chef.
You probably saw the brouhaha over the $400 Juicero juicer that can be replaced by a pair of hands. Also worth pointing out: Juice isn’t that good for you, because you get all the sugar and none of the fiber.
A licensed naturopathic “doctor” in California killed a patient with an injection of turmeric. Important lessons here: Turmeric is not a panacea – in fact, it probably doesn’t work at all – and naturopathy is bullshit.
Anti-vax nutjobs are claiming Sesame Street is ‘normalizing’ autism by introducing a muppet character on the spectrum. What the hell is wrong with these people?
Herd immunity is a big part of why making sure everyone who can be vaccinated gets vaccinated is important. Here’s a post with some useful graphics showing why that matters. You know parents who aren’t vaccinating? Don’t just avoid the subject. What they’re doing hurts their own kids and puts the whole community at risk.
Frog snot kills flu viruses. Really, it does, at least if it’s from this one frog species found in South India (which I’m sure will die off soon from chytrid disease anyway).
Alabama’s legislature voted to repeal permit requirements for residents to carry concealed weapons in the state. In a related story, I’ll skip the SEC tournament, held annually in Hoover, Alabama, this year, and will probably head to the ACC instead.
If you live in Florida and believe that people convicted of nonviolent felonies should be allowed to vote after they have served their sentences, there’s a petition to get a question on the 2018 ballot to make that change. Florida’s current rules are unusually draconian, and this amendment to the state’s constitution would still prohibit those convicted of murder or sex crimes from regaining their right to vote.
An LA Times editorial claims the American right is bringing back an old attack on Rachel Carson that says her anti-DDT activism cost millions of people their lives, a response to a Paul Offit piece from The Daily Beast that I linked here a few weeks ago. Skeptical Raptor looks at this in much greater, evidence-based depth, concluding that Offit’s take, that Carson’s writings and work had the unintended consequence of costing many people (mostly in developing countries) their lives, is largely accurate.
Advances in technology mean fake news is going to get worse, with the potential arising for faked audio recordings and video clips.
Racism was a major motivation for Trump voters, according to research by Ohio State assistant professor Thomas Wood.
Trump’s appointments appear to be violating ethics rules left and right, with “no transparency” on these hires and the elimination of a provision designed to limit such conflicts of interest.
A new Washington Post poll found that fewer people believe Trump’s lies, which may be a major reason Trump is making the Republican party “heinously unpopular” (according to New York magazine). But will it matter in 2018?
Oklahoma, which is dealing with earthquakes and drinking water pollution from fracking in the state, ended a state subsidy on wind power generation four years before originally planned.
Historian Aaron O’Connell argues that our ongoing efforts in Afghanistan are failing (audio link), and that we’re losing “hearts and minds” in addition to losing ground to the Taliban. He has edited a new book of essays on the subject, called Our Latest Longest War.
The Pacific Island nation of Palau is seeing clear, positive results from establishing an offshore marine sanctuary to restore the declining ecosystem in its waters. The irony of this is that Palau was previously a U.S. Trust Territory, becoming independent in 1994, and had that not happened their environmental efforts would likely be undergoing a reversal now (probably death by funding cuts) under our current Administration.
Comedian Ian Abramson did a standup set on Conan while wearing a dog’s shock collar, with an audience member holding the control. I’m including it because 1) the idea itself is kind of funny and 2) there’s a hilarious math joke in the set.
Extra Crispy tells us where to get a great croissant in fifteen US cities. This is very important information.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: appearances, environment, fitzgerald, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 15, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/15/17.

I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors this week; there’s minimal reranking in there, just status notes on players, with guys moving up to replace those already in the majors. (Jesse Winker was promoted after the piece ran.) I wrote a long draft blog post on Hunter Greene, Brian McKay, and other draft prospects I’ve seen so far. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

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

And now, the links…

The one great longread I saw this week was from Backchannel on what’s happened to Google Books, the tech giant’s stated effort to scan every book, ever, to make them all searchable. I’ve used this feature quite a few times, including during the research for Smart Baseball, where I could search for certain terms or keywords in books I couldn’t get my hands on.
California passed a tougher law on childhood vaccinations, and, lo and behold, inoculation rates went up about 3 percentage points.
The handful of loonies who opposed the law largely claimed “parental choice” as a reason why they should be allowed to deny their children a safe, effective treatment that can prevent debilitating and sometimes fatal diseases. It’s a terrible argument, because those “choices” affect everyone, not just your children. (Also, that choice isn’t for you – it’s for your child, who can’t choose for him/herself, and depends on you to take care of his/her medical needs.)
If you’ve seen a vaccine denier point to measles outbreaks in China as evidence the MMR vaccine doesn’t work, well, the outbreaks occurred among unvaccinated groups. Facts may not carry the day with deniers, but it is on the rational among us to make sure the truth is still out there for people who might be on the fence.
A Utah judge praised a convicted sexual abuser during sentencing, with at least one of the victims present. This kind of behavior will only discourage victims from coming forward in the future. Utah judges may be removed from the bench via a judicial conduct commission censure or a 2/3 vote of the legislature, so if you live in that state, get on the phone.
I think my new least favorite food buzzword is “clean.” Panera, which is a decent chain choice if you want something vegetarian while traveling, claims its food is 100% “clean,” which means absolutely nothing unless previously they were rolling their bread dough out on the floor. It’s also a buzzword for people who eat weird, ultra-restricted diets that probably don’t provide enough nutrition because so-called “clean eaters” often skip dairy or wheat, foods that are often demonized without scientific basis. I’ll keep eatin’ dirty, thanks.
Dr. David Dao, the passenger beaten and dragged off a United flight last week, has filed court papers in preparation for a lawsuit and compared his treatment to what he experienced while fighting in the Vietnam War. Tim Wu of the New Yorker wrote about why he stopped flying United after it merged with Continental. Deadspin’s Albert Burneko discussed the absurdity of backing the corporation in such cases.
An American doctor has been charged with mutilating the genitalia of two girls under the age of 10, a barbaric practice common in eastern African countries and in Indonesia known as female genital mutilation.
New Mexico has banned “lunch shaming,” the cruel practice of embarrassing children whose parents have unpaid school meal debts.
I listened to the entire seven episodes of the podcast S-Town, and I’m not sure if I think the time was well spent. Did I really get anything out of it? Was John B. McLemore, who was most likely a manic depressive on top of the later medical issues revealed in the final episode, someone worthy of a seven-hour biography? The Atlantic also asks about the ethics of revealing so much of his life after his death, and the details of other characters in the play. The Guardian went to Woodstock, Alabama, to interview the locals about their sudden bit of fame, and most didn’t seem to mind the portrayals.
I was apparently behind the times, as I was unfamiliar with the Twitter replies-to-retweets ratio until this past week.
Paul Krugman wrote that publicity stunts aren’t policy and then Trump ordered (or simply handwaved along) the dropping of the ‘mother of all bombs’ on Afghanistan. It’s working, though: Compare media coverage of the Russian connection, or of GOP rollbacks of Obama policies, to coverage of the Syria and Afghanistan bombings and now our taunting of North Korea. (For what it’s worth, the North Korean government has always been the one that worried me, because it’s essentially sociopathy in government form, and they’re well-funded enough to do mass damage to someone, South Korea or Japan or us. But I would prefer to see a long-term policy solution to the issue, not threatening to Pyongyang to wag the dog.)
There can be no beatings and imprisoning of gays in Chechnya because there are no gays in Chechnya, say Chechnyan authorities. This Guardian report says otherwise.
I enjoyed this interview with Dana Cree, pastry chef for Chicago’s Publican restaurant group and author of the new cookbook Hello, My Name Is Ice Cream: The Art and Science of the Scoop. Within the Q&A she discusses which ingredients serve as stabilizers to minimize the size of ice crystals in ice cream, providing a smoother texture. I personally do not like the eggless ice cream known as Philadelphia-style, which is just dairy, sugar, and flavors, for that very reason. I prefer frozen custard, sometimes called New York ice cream, which includes egg yolks – often a lot – and less butterfat, because the yolks contain lecithin, which emulsifies the fat and the water in the base and thus prevents large crystals from forming. Lecithin can break down at subzero temperatures, however, so vegetable gums may be better if you’re going super-cold, if you can’t eat eggs, or if you don’t want that slight eggnog note in a delicate flavor like vanilla bean.
The first part of this NPR Fresh Air interview with author David Owen, about the Colorado River, is interesting and particularly relevant to me, because one of the main reasons I did not want to remain a long-term resident of Arizona was that the state has no strategy for dealing with the coming water crisis in the region. The Colorado River is overtaxed, badly, and Arizona’s idea of coping is storing a few years of water in underground reserves. He has a new book out on the topic, Where the Water Goes, and discusses some of it in the Q&A. Then he talks about golfing with Donald Trump and I moved on with my life.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, environment, food science, ice cream, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 1, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/1/17.

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

My book is back from the printers! You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. The book now has two positive reviews out, one from Kirkus Reviews and one from Publishers Weekly.

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ March 26, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/26/17.

My annual column of breakout player picks went up on Thursday for Insiders, and I held a Klawchat that same day. I had one other Insider post since the last roundup, on four prospects I saw in Arizona, one Cub, one Royal, and two Padres.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. The book now has two positive reviews out, one from Kirkus Reviews and one from Publishers Weekly.

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

And now, the links…

Call your Representatives ASAP if you oppose the stripping of online privacy rights, not that I think anything’s going to stop the Republicans from helping the ISPs here.
Why don’t we have a Lyme disease vaccine for humans, even though there’s one for dogs? Blame the anti-vaxxers.
You can also blame them if rubella, which causes autism, makes a comeback.
Venezuelan’s spiraling economic crisis means there’s a severe shortage of critical drugs for the mentally ill.
Thank goodness the Administration is trying to save us from such dangerous people as the Syrian refugees who’ve started a booming chocolate company in Canada. I feel so much safer already.
Is the Admin’s ban on the use of laptops and tablets on certain Middle Eastern airlines actually just retaliation in an ongoing trade war?
I don’t complain about the amount I pay in federal income taxes, but I do think it’s ridiculous how difficult and complicated it is. (I have used an accountant for the last five years, since my work contracts became more involved.) Why is filing still so difficult? Because Intuit and H&R Block spend millions in lobbying to keep it that way.
An independent group that monitors civilian deaths from airstrikes (including those by drones) says they are overwhelmed by the uptick in such claims since the new Administration took office. The drone program was one of the worst of Obama’s policies, but it appears it’s been cranked up since the regime change. This is a very good way to make a whole new generation of terrorists who hate the United States.
You should be horrified by the “advice” a Homeland Security official gave Gizmodo staffers on workplace violence.
The New England Journal of Medicine has an op ed suggesting some better answers for HHS Secretary Tom Price on mandatory immunizations.
If you live in Florida, call your state reps to tell them you oppose the new bill to allow the teaching of creationism in public schools. It’s a violation of the separation of church and state anyway, but still, let’s not go down that particular toilet.
The gluten-free craze is driven by anti-science and opportunism. A lot of pseudo-doctors (like “naturopaths” or chiropractors) sell a bunch of tests and treatments to people who don’t need any of this, using consumer misperceptions about things like gluten.
Chiropractors like this one, accused of practicing medicine without a license. If your chiropractor starts claiming s/he can cure or treat various diseases, call your state licensing board.
A company that takes advantage of consumer ignorance about science had to recall one of its products because it contained peanuts. So much of organic/non-GM marketing is about the claim that consumers of other products don’t know what’s in their food. The irony is thick here.
Julie DiCaro asks Indiana basketball to reconsider considering Steve Alford for its open head coaching position.
I particularly enjoyed Will Leitch’s look at the biggest droughts in various pro and college sports because I’m pretty team-agnostic in any sport, so my rooting interest is often determined by who’s gone the longest without a title/playoff appearance/whatever, or who’s never had one in franchise or school history.
There’s supposed to be a ruling in the Roman Polanski rape case due within the next 90 days. He’s 83, and spent 40 years outside the U.S., fighting extradition and avoiding jail time for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. Why the fuck would we let this creep back into the country?
New York Times food critic Pete Wells visited Austin’s Franklin BBQ.
Tacos Chiwas, one of the hottest new restaurants in Phoenix from 2016, was burglarized earlier this month. I ate there in October and was a big fan of their Chihuahuan-style tacos, which were an absolute bargain too. There’s a GoFundMe page to try to help the restaurant’s owners recover some of what they lost.
I gave Leitch a link, so now I have to give one to Grierson. Here’s Tim’s rundown of the documentaries at the annual True/False film festival, held in Columbia, Missouri.
I was unfamiliar with the annual Disability Day of Mourning until reading this editorial on the unnoticed crimes of caregivers killing their disabled charges.
The Texas state alcohol licensing board spent tends of thousands of public dollars partying, traveling to expensive resorts to drink with industry lobbyists. The state government of Texas is a septic tank.
White supremacists have created a “guide” to posing as black people while operating troll accounts on social media.
High Street on Market is one of my favorite restaurants in Philly, maybe my favorite, period. I didn’t realize that chef-owner Eli Kulp was left paralyzed by the May 2015 Amtrak derailment until I saw this week about a new wine from his restaurant group. They’ll donate $25 from every bottle to spinal cord research.
I’m sure you’ve seen one or both of these, but in the Schadenfreude Department, we have the idiot woman who voted for Trump, only to see her husband arrested and likely deported, and rural Trump voters about to lose their development programs if his proposed budget passes. I want to feel bad, but these people each bear some tiny sliver of responsibility for this mess we’re in. Voting matters, and voting incorrectly has consequences.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bbq, documentaries, evolution, food safety, links, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

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