links — Page 34

→ November 20, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/20/16.

I spent the last week on vacation with my family, in the Bahamas, which was lovely due to the weather, the friendly people, and the rum. Before I left, I filed four offseason buyers’ guides, to the markets for starting pitchers, relief pitchers, infielders & catchers, and outfielders. I also participated in a ’roundtable’ piece with Dan Szymborski where we discussed our NL ROY ballots.

I reviewed the family boardgame Legendary Inventors for Paste; it’s cute but feels a bit unfinished given the imbalance across the various scoring methods. Earlier this month, I updated my all-time favorite boardgame rankings, which now runs to 100 titles.

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

And now, the links…

A Tribe Called Quest dropped its final album, We Got It From Here, Thank You for Your Service last Friday, and the New York Times has the definitive backstory on the album, which came about due to a thaw in the long estrangement between Q-Tip and Phife, only to have the latter pass away due to complications from diabetes in March.
We can’t let the bullies win. That’s psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who won the 2016 John Maddox Prize for her defense of science against denialists, but it could apply to any aspect of our public discourse on climate change, evolution, vaccines, or, now, civil rights.
Fear of science drove opposition to a plan to release genetically modified mosquitos in the Florida Keys, but the plan is going ahead to try to prevent a Zika outbreak there. This isn’t straight science denial, but ignorance and fear, and it comes with the same arguments about unknown and unstated “risks” that simply aren’t consistent with an understanding of the technology at play here.
The murder of three elderly nuns in Burundi touched off an ongoing political crisis that has led to over 300,000 refugees fleeing the country, the President violating the constitution, and his government killing the son and son-in-law of the country’s leading human rights figure, who survived an assassination attempt himself. The global community, meanwhile, does nothing but watch, as we did twenty years ago.
If you live in North Carolina, it appears that the state Republican Party is trying to steal the gubernatorial election, even though the state was already among the biggest offenders in enacting voter-suppression tactics.
With food allergies still on the rise, there’s a rise in startups providing products that try to detect hidden allergens in food.
Vaccination refusals are up in Texas, a state that is rapidly becoming a gigantic experiment in rolling back civilization by a hundred years, and parents of at-risk kids are asking why. The answer is simple: End non-medical exemptions. In Delaware, I worked with my state rep to make it harder to get a so-called religious exemption, and philosophical exemptions were already prohibited.
If you’re wondering why I’m saying this about Texas, a state rep there has introduced a bill to ban local ordinances that protect LGBTQ residents from discrimination, along with the usual “bathroom privacy” bullshit (again, I ask, which bathroom should intersex people use?). If you live in Texas, call your state reps and tell them you oppose this bill, which business leaders in Texas have said could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues.
A hospital staffer in the UK came down with whooping cough (pertussis) and may have exposed newborns to the virus.
Pertussis can kill an infant, and they’re typically not vaccinated against it until they’re two months old.
A British woman who ended up comatose due to a flu infection in 2014 and nearly died is now urging others not to skip the flu vaccination as she did that year.
The proposed new head of the EPA under Donald Trump has called climate change ‘nothing to worry about’ and has called the Paris climate agreement ‘potentially a disaster for humankind.’
The attempts to intimidate and silence the Theranos whistleblower would be disturbing enough if they didn’t include his own grandfather, Theranos board member and former Secretary of State George Shultz.
Twitter has booted a few of the most virulent white-supremacist and alt-right figures on the service, including white nationalist (and UVA alum!) Richard Spencer. The Ringer has a piece arguing that the move means Twitter has finally started to follow its stated policies on hate speech.
A researcher programmed bot accounts to fight racism on twitter and found that they were somewhat effective … especially when the bot appeared to be a white male with a few hundred followers (as opposed to one or two).
Facebook’s fake news problem isn’t really the main reason the site reinforces false beliefs; it’s a more fundamental issue with how we receive and process such information. In other words, we seek out what we want to hear, and we believe what we want to believe.
Speaking of fake news sites, if you use Chrome, here’s a browser extension to let you know if you’re visiting one.
The American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan praised Trump’s hiring of Stephen Bannon as his “chief strategist,” in case you’re still kidding yourself about the direction of this cabal.
“We need to talk about the online radicalisation of young, white men” was the best headline of the week, and also touches on a very real concern for anyone who, say, views women as actual people.
Donald Trump’s tax plan strongly resembles the tax plan that has bankrupted Kansas. The Fed recently ranked Kansas last among all 50 states for employment growth, unemployment rate, and wage growth. This is the type of economic thinking – thunking? – we’ve now given the reins of our federal government.
Salmonella bacteria and other pathogens that cause food poisoning thrive in packaged salad bags. One solution is to just not buy these bags in the first place, but if you don’t have a better alternative, avoid bags where any leaves have started to turn mushy and dark green, avoid bags that appear tight and swollen (indicating bacterial growth that’s producing gases that expand the bag), and wash and pick over the leaves when you open the bag.
United Airlines is establishing a new lower class of service to make air travel more insufferable than usual. I’m a dedicated and happy Southwest customer and frequent flier, in large part because they don’t do this stuff.
Pete Wells gave a very positive review to a Japanese ramen/noodle-shop chain’s first outpost in the U.S.. He praised TsuruTonTan Udon Noodle Brasserie’s noodle dishes but says rather plainly to avoid their other offerings.
Deadspin suggests that we boo Mike Pence whenever possible. I find the right’s claims that the audience’s actions at Hamilton disrespectful absolutely ludicrous, given how the President-Elect publicly mocked a disabled reporter during the campaign.
Oxford English Dictionaries named post-truth its word of the year.
The agony and the irony: Mike Pence fighting a lawsuit, trying to keep his emails private. The plaintiff is trying to find out how much Pence cost Indiana taxpayers when he joined other states in a 2014 lawsuit against the Obama administration over an order to defer the deportation of some illegal immigrants.
Investing in infrastructure was one of the few aspects of Trump’s vague platform that I could support, but Paul Krugman argues its proposed implementation appears to be a financial scam, and won’t focus on the kinds of public works we need – which, unfortunately, don’t generate revenues.
The Federal Election Commission declined to investigate a dark-money group that spent all its funds on an election, even though it claims to be a social-welfare charity. At this point, we might as well shut the FEC down completely.
Area Man Considers Self Ally To Women Unless They Threaten His Status In Literally Any Way.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, denialism, gmo, japanese cuisine, links, ramen, rap, vaccines

→ November 12, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/12/16.

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

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

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

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

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

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

→ November 5, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/5/16.

My big news this week was the formal announcement of my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, which will be released in April of 2017. I have gotten many requests from readers over the years for a recommendation of a book to let them get up to speed on ‘new’ stats, and since the book on that topic didn’t exist, I decided to try to write it. You can pre-order it via amazon and other sites already; it will be out in hardcover and as an e-book, but Harper Collins has not decided on an audio version yet. I also do not yet know what appearances I’ll be making or if there will be any sort of tour.

I held my regular Klawchat on Friday this past week, and my latest boardgame review for Paste covers the Hanabi-like deduction game Beyond Baker Street, where you can’t see the cards in your own hand and must give clues to other players on what cards they hold.

My email newsletter has now passed 2500 subscribers; thank you to everyone who’s already signed up. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for?

And now, the links…

The LA Times has an outstanding investigative piece on alleged corruption in the development of an LA apartment complex. Congresswoman Janice Hahn, a Democrat from LA, took $200,000 in “donations” from people connected to the project, many of which appear to have been submitted under different names to skirt individual donation limits.
If you care in the least about American democracy, you should be outraged over ongoing voter suppression – especially of the black vote in states like North Carolina.
And, again, if you care in the least about our democracy and don’t want to see the GOP follow through on its promise to block any Hillary nominees for the Supreme Court vacancy, well, get out and vote to give Democrats control of the Senate. If the Republicans lose enough power, they will have to change their message (and pick a better candidate next time).
Top Chef alum Kwame Onwuachi’s new DC restaurant, Shaw Bijou, has garnered mediocre reviews for its $185 tasting menu, a price that doesn’t include wine pairings, tax, or tip, which can bring the total to $500 per person.
An Alberta judge ruled that a four-year-old boy who insists that he’s a girl cannot wear girls’ clothes, part of an ongoing custody battle where the child’s father refuses to even consider that his child is transgender. The risk of suicide or other self-harm in this case is through the roof and the judge’s actions are indefensible.
The New York Times ran a lengthy piece saying GM crops don’t deliver promised results, but the American Council on Science and Health immediately called bullshit on the article.
Deadspin has another fascinating longread this week, this time on con artist and self-styled foreign policy “expert” Robert Caruso, who’s scammed his way into numerous TV appearances and writing gigs, including one for the Council on Foreign Relations.
If you want to fight climate change, stopping deforestation is an essential step and probably the easiest large-scale move we can make to reduce global warming and ocean acidification. Some advocates have gotten pledges from major food manufacturers to help, but do these pledges actually mean or do anything?
Two states have major energy/climate change-related ballot questions this year. Washington is proposing a carbon emissions tax, while Florida has a tricky question pushed by traditional utilities that would make solar panels less cost-effective for homeowners.
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a measles complication that is nearly always fatal and occurs up to ten years after infection, may be more common than we thought. Imagine watching your nine-year-old kid get something akin to ALS or multiple systems atrophy. The only way to prevent it is to not get measles in the first place, which means vaccination.
Meanwhile, a bunch of deranged parents in southern California are trying to cure their autistic kids with bleach. The scam artists peddling this crap claim to be part of a “church,” and they’re under investigation in Texas as well for selling what is essentially bleach as a miracle cure.
Alton Brown is bringing back Good Eats as an online show, although the title may change and he says the format will allow him to do some things he couldn’t do on TV for legal reasons. (Maybe that means using lye in the pretzel-cooking water?)
I mentioned those “Around the Web” ads in chat this week, and they were already on my mind because of this article explaining how some publishers are moving away from them anyway. They’re all clickbait, never really tied to the article I’m reading or any data that might indicate my real interests, and often the images used with them are disturbing or provocative (like a pic of Jose Fernandez) just to get you to click.
A 24-year-old Saudi Arabian student at the University of Wisconsin-Stout was beaten to death by an unidentified white man this past week. The suspect remains at large. While it’s not known if this was specifically a hate crime, the circumstances and timing point that way.
Liberal Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz writes that the Southern Poverty Law Center is wrong to label him “anti-Muslim,” pointing out that critics of Islam often say that the religion needs people to try to reform the religion from within and stop Islamist fundamentalism. The SPLC’s listing on Nawaz calls into doubt some of his motivations and details of his background, but also called him “anti-Muslim” for publishing a cartoon depicting Jesus and Mohammed.
The downfall of South Korean President Park Geun-hye is totally bonkers, tied to a forty-year connection with the daughter of a cult leader.
Land reclamation is increasingly popular as small city-states like Singapore and Monaco try to find more space for their people, or wealthy nations like Dubai (in the UAE) try to … do whatever it is they’re doing, but there are substantial environmental costs to these projects.
In response to an ongoing sexual harassment scandal, where male soccer players were writing and emailing sexually-charged “scouting reports” on female soccer recruits, Harvard did the right thing and canceled the rest of the men’s soccer season. Several of the women targeted in one of those documents wrote a powerful, indignant response to the men who objectified and degraded them.
Hillary Clinton faces intense animosity, often expressed in vulgar terms as she approaches the election. While some of it is clearly connected to her actions, much of it is about her husband and even more is because she’s a woman.
All right, let’s do this… The NY Times details how Trump used a legally “dubious” method to avoid paying taxes for so many years. Newsweek explains how his companies destroyed emails and documents in defiance of court orders. If you question Hillary’s ethics, how could you possibly think more of Trump?
Thomas Friedman points out that Trump’s stated policy goals will hurt, not help, his core voters. If you vote for him, you’re probably going to end up worse off economically if he wins. (I think we’ll all end up worse off as our economy contracts, but his base, less-educated white male voters, seem especially likely to suffer.) A Vox piece from a few weeks ago reached the same conclusion about Trump’s tax plans, which favor the highest-income bracket.
David Frum makes the conservative case for voting for Hillary, and against Trump, who is in no way a classical conservative. I disagree with Frum on one key point: I think as President, Trump would have plenty of help in trying to silence opposing media.
Ross Douthat points out the dangers of a Trump victory, from civil unrest (which we may see even if he loses) to global destabilization.
Prof. Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, who wrote a book on Hitler’s use of propaganda, compares Trump’s use of the same to Hitler’s and claims to find similarities.
The Guardian has a piece arguing the real reveal in the Podesta emails is how the American power elite protects and helps itself by retaining power. Whether you’re voting for Hillary (as I am) or not, the emails should disturb you for their demonstration of how money and back-room deals subvert the ostensibly open nature of our republic. Esquire details how Russia pulled off this hack, the biggest in U.S. election history (so far).
From May, Adam Gopnik’s excellent and prescient New Yorker piece on the dangerous acceptance of Donald Trump.
Scientific American, which does not normally take stands on political races, has pointed out several times that Trump’s lack of respect for and ignorance of science is alarming. That piece is from September 1st, but I think if anything he’s shown the issue is worse than we thought at the time, given his increasingly distant relationship with the truth.
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter lays waste to Trump, whom he’s known for over twenty years.
Because we all need some levity right now, here’s a hilarious BBC video of a clever honey badger who is a master escape artist.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, gmo, good eats, links, stick to baseball, top chef, vaccines

→ October 29, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/29/16.

I wrote one Insider piece this week, a World Series preview, although I also spent some time working on the upcoming free agents ranking. I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, my latest boardgame review covers Arcane Academy, a wizard-themed game that isn’t aimed at kids specifically but that I think is a much better game for young players than for adults.

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

And now, the links…

Let’s start with the longreads of the week. This Deadspin profile of the late sportswriter Jennifer Frey, a former wunderkind who died this February of long-term alcohol abuse, is on the very short list of the best things I’ve read all year.
Annie Apple, a domestic abuse survivor and mother of a NY Giants player, wrote an emotional piece on why she couldn’t stay silent about Josh Brown.
Harvard magazine covers the quiet fight to end the death penalty in the United States. Californians will vote on whether to keep the death penalty next month.
The Washingtonian looks at how Donald Trump’s comments on Mexicans cost his new DC hotel its main two celebrity chef tenants.
Sid Meier’s Civilization was one of my favorite videogames ever; I spent a good chunk of the fall of 1992 playing it whenever I had time to spare and even when I didn’t. Author Kanishk Tharoor looks back at the game’s impact and its flaws.
Author Emily St. John, who wrote the wonderful, haunting novel Station Eleven, wrote a piece for FiveThirtyEight on the rise of books with “girl” in the title, which looks more generally at how books are named and marketed.
The members of the hip-hop duo Black Sheep look back at the making of their debut album, A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. Here they come, yo.
The NY Times‘ op ed page looks at Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s habit of overreaching on regulatory issues.
Drugmaker Purdue, which is coming under substantial scrutiny lately for its role in pushing oxycontin, helped stop regulations in West Virginia that would have limited prescriptions. West Virginia has been hit particularly hard by the ongoing epidemic of opioid addictions and overdoses, as Last Week Tonight covered in a recent episode.
ESPN ran a great piece by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, a member of the Blackfeet Reservation, on what the debate over the Cleveland baseball mascot misses.
Researchers at Harvard are a new method to search for new antibiotics, building molecules called macrolides from the ground up and then testing them against a spectrum of bacteria to look for the most effective candidates.
SCOTUS agreed to review a case from Virginia on a school that wants to prevent a transgender boy from using the boys’ bathroom. The school’s policy isn’t protecting anyone’s rights, only restricting the plaintiff’s. Also, as I’ve said before, these policies and laws that refer to someone’s sex at birth ignore the existence of intersex people.
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory believe they’ve found conditions where the Second Law of Thermodynamics may break down at a microscopic level – that is, where entropy may temporarily decrease in violation of that law. I’m sure Lisa Simpson would be relieved to hear this.
Fellow Trader Joes fans may enjoy this BBC video on the Canadian store Pirate Joes and the mild-manner man who runs it by smuggling Trader Joes items he purchases in Washington back across the border to sell at huge markups.
The emails, the emails, what what the emails … Kurt Eichenwald provides some clarity on what a non-issue yesterday’s FBI letter was, while Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution offers a memo to the press on what the letter does and doesn’t mean, including the most reasonable defense of FBI director Comey’s actions I’ve seen.
If you want to know what Trump’s economic proposals might do to the U.S. economy, look no further than Kansas, where the economic news is so bad the state isn’t reporting it.
More video from the BBC, this time on Trump’s appeal in Ohio, straight from his supporters’ mouths.
The BBC has also been running a series on online blackmail using sexual images in conservative parts of the world from the Middle East to south Asia, including a video that reenacts the story of a woman jailed in Tunisia for killing the man who raped her repeatedly.
The implosion of Chris Christie has gone largely unnoticed during the Presidential campaign, but for a one-time rising star within the Republican party, it’s been a swift and ugly fall from grace.
Why are rainbow sprinkles suddenly everywhere? I think it’s an odd thing to feel nostalgic over, since they don’t exactly have any taste.
Is a vaccine for the common cold finally within reach? I hate being sick like everyone, but I feel like this is a real First World Problem. There are illnesses that kill people in the developing world that should take priority over the sniffles.
The Saudi Arabian attack on Yemen has caused an enormous humanitarian disaster, including mass starvation. Those are our “friends” the Saudis, you know.
Canada has been holding a 23-year-old native Canadian man without trial, in solitary confinement, for over four years. Under UN definitions, he has been tortured. He was finally moved to a new cell this week after public criticism, but how did this happen in the first place?
NPR looks at whether a 20-something male should still consider getting the HPV vaccine. The short answer is yes.
NPR also has a useful guide to buying and using winter squash. I didn’t know that certain types are better at different points in the winter.
Brazil and Colombia are releasing populations of mosquitos infected with a bacterium that may slow the spread of Zika and dengue.
Paste has a review of a new D&D manual, which I include here because the book is written as if it’s from the perspective of the character Volo. Fellow Baldur’s Gate fans may remember Volo as a sort of amusing ass who kept showing up and telling you stuff you already knew, or just making shit up as he went along.
Finally, Funny or Die has a message for would-be protest voters.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: death penalty, links, rap, rpgs, stick to baseball, vaccines, video games

→ October 22, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/22/16.

My second dispatch from the AFL covers Michael Kopech, Francis Martes, Dillon Tate, and more. I also wrote a column on the Dbacks’ hire of Mike Hazen and the lack of diversity in front offices. Both pieces are for Insiders, and neither mentions Tim Tebow. I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the pirate-themed Islebound, a gorgeous game that plays slow and dry.

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

And now, the links…

The BBC discusses the tyranny and oppression beneath the sunny surface of Gambia, a popular tourist destination for Europeans. A sad note on this story: its author, Chris Simpson, died this week in his hotel room in Senegal shortly after filing. The cause of death has not been determined.
A 31-year-old researcher from UC Davis was killed by a rock-thrower during protests in Ethiopia last month. Ethiopia had been one of the few stable countries in east Africa, bordering the non-state of Somalia, the brutal dictatorship in Eritrea, and the weak, beleaguered government of South Sudan. Ethiopia is also a major producer of coffee, and the unrest there (including the destruction of washing stations) will likely lead to higher coffee prices.
Burundi is also sliding into collapse and the international community needs to step up its involvement in trying to reach a political solution. The humanitarian crisis there is growing; there are over 400,000 displaced Burundians and nearly half the population needs food aid.
Is the so-called Islamic State finished? Its territory may be shrinking, along with its resources, but that may mean the group disperses into a stateless terrorist network like its parent, al Qaeda.
Amnesty International accuses Australia of intentionally torturing refugees in its Nauru detention center, which the Australians denied, of course. The NY Times editorial board slammed Australia as well as Nauru, which pockets a tidy profit from hosting the center while limiting press access.
How about some longreads? Outside has the crazy story of the search for the wreckage of Eastern Airlines flight 980, which crashed in the mountains of Bolivia in 1985. Two climbers took the author on their quest to find the black box recorders and any of the bodies, none of which was found in initial recovery efforts.
The best thing I read all week was the Washington Post‘s story on Derek Black, son of the white supremacist behind Stormfront, chronicling Derek’s realization that he didn’t want to be heir to his father’s throne – or affiliated with white supremacist movements at all.
This profile of James Beard Award-winning chef and pizzaiolo Chris Bianco is stellar, getting into Bianco’s thoughts on pizza, food, and life in general. Bianco’s business partner, Seth Sulka, co-owns the Hillside Spot in Ahwatukee, where I ate twice last week (get the chilaquiles verdes with hash browns, you won’t regret it), and Tratto, the new place discussed in this article, is outstanding.
FiveThirtyEight has an excellent longread on the upcoming vote in the Florida Keys over releasing genetically modified mosquitos to try to fight Aedes aegypti, the species most responsible for spreading the Zika virus, dengue fever, and chikungunya. Within that article is the issue of allowing the public to vote on matters of public health that might be best decided by experts but where the decision may directly affect the voters’ physical well-being.
I’d rather not link to the New York Review of Books, but they did have the best story on the Kansas City librarian facing dubious criminal charges for protecting a patron’s First Amendment rights.
The Arizona Republic received death threats after the paper endorsed Hillary Clinton for President – the first time the paper had ever endorsed a Democrat for the office. Their response to the threats was to stand firm in their beliefs.
This was a tough read: the Charlotte Observer has a story on the almost 17-year-old son of convicted murderer* Rae Carruth. The boy has cerebral palsy, the result of his mother bleeding out after the shooting, and he’s been raised by his grandmother. Carruth has had no contact with the boy since he was one and still claims he had nothing to do with his girlfriend’s death. (*Carruth was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, but ‘convicted conspiracist’ doesn’t really sound right.)
Pro-Trump supporters have gone way beyond even the depraved norms of online harassment, as detailed by conservative, anti-Trump writer David French. If you’re voting for Trump, these are your comrades-in-arms. You surely deserve each other.
A University of Hawai’i professor opposed to genetic modification of food crops participated in the harassment of University of Florida Professor Kevin Folta, one of the leading proponents of GM crops. So why is Valenzuela still on the staff of a public university?
Why should you care? Well, genetic modification has produced tobacco plants that produce high amounts of artemisinin, a potent anti-malarial treatment.
So-called “detox” products are a scam. Really. All of them. Your liver takes care of most of this for you – including, by the way, the trace amounts of ethylmercury that used to be found in vaccines as thimerosal.
Friday’s DDoS attack on a DNS provider is a really bad sign for the future of the internet. I used to work for a company (prior to my baseball career) that made anti-DDoS software and was purchased by a larger firm in 2010, but my lay understanding of this attack is that the sheer quantities of data being thrown at servers are bigger than most solutions can handle.
Useful tips on how to succeed in meetings by not paying attention better than anyone else.
The proposed new ballpark for the Rangers in Arlington, Texas, is just a giant transfer of wealth to the team’s owners, and if you live in Arlington, you should vote against the proposal next month. They can afford to build their own stadium without taking money from the public’s pockets.
Trump repeated a pro-life claim about babies being “ripped” from their mother’s wombs in the debate, sparking this post from a woman who had to terminate her pregnancy or die of preeclampsia. Her “abortion” came at 23 weeks, but the alternative was to die (and have the fetus die with her).
Where the fuck are mainstream Republicans on Trump’s vote-rigging claims? Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake are among the few who have stood up to deny him, and we should all remember the names of other Republicans who did so – and those who didn’t.
Governor Mike Pence’s administration in Indiana may be engaging in some old Jim Crow-style voter suppression. Maybe that’s the kind of vote-rigging Trump is warning us about!
The mayor of nearby West York, Pennsylvania, resigned after he posted a series of racist memes mocking President Obama and black Americans in general. I bet you can’t guess who he’s supporting for President!
Daniel Dale has become one of the most popular fact-checkers on Twitter, with daily updates on the candidate’s falsehoods. Dale wrote a story for Politico on how and why he ended up in this role.
I linked to a few stories about Kelly Oxford’s #notokay Twitter campaign last week; the stories kept coming this week too, including one from a woman who says the tweets helped her realize she’s been assaulted and a related story from Goldie Taylor on why she didn’t talk about her rape for 30 years.
We’ve got a scandal brewing here in Delaware, where the Christina School District illegally withheld over $7 million in funds that should have gone to charter schools. That district, which includes the town of Newark and the University of the Delaware, has been plagued by low ratings and complaints about poor school performance, even though it doesn’t include the most economically disadvantaged parts of the state.
The Telegraph used Phil Collins’ revelation that he’s a recovering alcoholic to cover the new trend of “mid-lifers” developing severe drinking problems.
Couple of tweets worth seeing. First, more on the people you’re in bed with if you’re supporting Trump:

I live near KKK headquarters, and I want to make sure everyone sees the paper they left in my driveway, promoting #TrumpPence16. His base: pic.twitter.com/cWVf3LhDus

— Casey (@pari_passu) October 16, 2016

And this one, in which the tweeter (?) trolls Dilbert creator, Trump supporter, and man no longer in touch with reality Scott Adams:

dilbert is mine now pic.twitter.com/CyY6aKJ8oL

— leon (@leyawn) October 19, 2016

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, gmo, links, pizza, pseudoscience, rape culture, stick to baseball

→ October 15, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/15/16.

I have written two posts on the Arizona Fall League so far, one on real prospects and one on Tim Tebow. (These were originally one article, but the baseball editors chose to split it up.) There will be another post coming soon covering everything else I saw while in Arizona. I wrote a piece earlier in the week discussing the use of instant replay on slides, which has come up several times already this postseason. I held my usual
Klawchat on Thursday as well.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the abstract two-player game Agamemnon, which I think is just fantastic. It’s quick to learn and play, offers some simple variations to increase the replay value, and has just the right amounts of competition and randomness for a great two-player title.

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

And now, the links…

One of the Central Park Five – five men arrested and convicted of a brutal rape, only to be exonerated when the actual rapist confessed over a decade later – wrote an emotional editorial on how Donald Trump continues to harm him with the candidate’s continued insistence that the men were guilty. (Trump ran a full-page ad at the time of the crime, calling for New York to reinstate the death penalty for these five kids.)
Trump’s comments about “rigged” elections pose an existential threat to our democracy, and Professor Rick Hasen’s post calls on other Republican leaders to disavow these statements, as we already see Trump supporters talking about taking up arms if he loses the election. Of course, this isn’t new for Trump; he is also threatening to jail his opponent if he wins.
Adults who weren’t vaccinated and caught vaccine-preventabble diseases cost the U.S. $7.1 billion in 2015 in medical costs and lost productivity, in case you’re wondering why you should care about morons who don’t get vaccinated.
Yet another study has found no link between thimerosal or mercury-containing vaccines and autism.
Creationism is on the rise in Europe, even though Europe as a whole is more secular than the U.S. and has been more accepting of the reality of evolution.
The Guardian has a great longread on the insanity of the bottled water industry. In the developed world, where tap water is safe to drink, it is absolutely criminal to consume bottled water at the rate we do, from the environmental costs of shipping it to the wastes of plastic involved in packaging it.
World leaders meeting in Rwanda this week are trying to ban another set of greenhouse gases. Banning hydrofluorocarbons (HFC) requires amending the Montreal Protocol, but these gases are more than 1000 times more potent in contributing to warming than carbon dioxide is.
A Chinese mining firm has received approval to destroy a koala habitat in Australia so they can build a coal mine. There’s a lot wrong here, since burning coal itself is a contributor to climate change.
There’s a state of emergency in Ethiopia, where two ethnic groups, the Oromo and the Amhara, have protested rule by the minority Tigreans, the same sort of sectarian divisions that led to Eritrea’s secession and ongoing skirmishes between the two countries.
A reader sent along this story on the ‘biryani wars’ in India, where the iconic dish has become subject to accusations of tainted food and government inspections.
The Trump/sexual assault storyline has been well-covered everywhere, so I’m not linking to any of those hundreds of stories. But one thing I want to highlight that’s tangentially related is writer Kelly Oxford’s call for women to share their stories of sexual assault on Twitter, which produced a deluge of replies. The Washington Post and the Guardian had two of the best summaries of Oxford’s efforts and the conversations it has launched.
Meanwhile, Mike Pence’s own policy positions have skated a bit under the radar, which I think is a mistake given the instability of his running mate. This is the first time I’ve linked to Cosmopolitan, but their summary of Pence’s anti-abortion policies is worthwhile. He tried to pass a law that would have required women who had abortions or miscarriages to hold funerals for the dead fetuses. Not mentioned is that he also tried to allocate state funds to “gay conversion” therapy, which doesn’t work and is opposed by the American Psychiatric Association.
The NY Times found the one 19-year-old black man who’s skewing the USC/LA Times poll. The reasons are a bit technical, but I think they provide some good insight on how polling works.
The President of the Iowa Federation of Republican Women resigned her post and wrote a long explanation of why, calling it an “unhealthy relationship” when the party she supports is backing a candidate who has a history of sexual assault and of bragging about it.
Three men were arrested in Kansas this week for plotting terrorist acts. The men were white and appear to claim to be Christian, and their targets were Muslims. I doubt they realize how incredibly un-Christian such actions would be.
Wisconsin forward Nigel Hayes dropped some truth on his Twitter feed about the NCAA and its institutions profiting off the unpaid labor of athletes:

You make a company millions. They "pay" you with only a college education (estimated UW $160,000).

Fair, right? https://t.co/Hy3yKP42hH

— Nigel Hayes (@NIGEL_HAYES) October 14, 2016

Emma Baccelleri wrote more about Hayes’ commentary in a strong post on Deadspin.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, climate change, evolution, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ September 24, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/24/16.

I named Houston’s Alex Bregman as our 2016 Prospect of the Year, and listed a bunch of other worthy candidates and the 2016 draftees who had the top debuts as well, all for Insiders. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the cute, fast-playing game New Bedford, where players build the town and send ships out on whaling expeditions to rack up points. I really loved everything about that game – it looks great, the play is simple, Within that review is a paragraph on its two-player spinoff, Nantucket.

You can pre-order my book, Smart Baseball, on amazon already; it’s due out in April. Also, sign up for my email newsletter to stay up to date on all the stuff I write in various places.

And now, the links…

Terry Jones, one of the original members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, has been diagnosed with dementia at age 74. He’s losing or has lost his ability to speak (aphasia), a shame for a great comic talent and the author of this delightful letter to then-President George W. Bush.
Turmeric is being touted by all the woo-wielding nature-people for alleged health benefits … and that might be true, as long as you eat it as opposed to taking supplements. My guess is that it requires the presence of fats to work. Its main benefits appear to be anti-inflammatory, although too much turmeric can also give you heartburn so don’t go too nuts. I add a teaspoon of it when making homemade granola; it alters the color but not the flavor.
“I’m a non-binary ten-year-old,” writes a child for the BBC’s magazine site. What bathroom would you suggest this child (who prefers ze or they) use? How about those with ambiguous genitalia, known as intersex? Why is this a fucking government issue at all?
Speaking of which, North Carolina’s Hate Bill 2 has cost the state nearly $400 million already in lost business, according to an estimate from WIRED, all in the name of discriminating against LGBTQ people. If you live there, you get to vote in November and let your representatives know how you feel about this…
Truthout looks at Penn State truthers who try to whitewash the tattered legacy of Joe Paterno. Not mentioned is the sick role Paterno’s adult children play in this, using semantics to argue that their father somehow wasn’t culpable in covering up for a sexual predator.
Two interesting posts on attempts to save dying languages, one on a Native American woman trying to create the first Wukchumni dictionary, as she’s its last fluent speaker, and the effort to save the Chickasaw language with an app, part of a broader piece on language loss.
Following up on the Derrick Rose story I posted last week, Julie DiCaro wrote about the importance of anonymity in rape cases after the judge in that civil suit ruled that Rose’s attorneys can name the victim (and smear her).
A rare Hawai’ian crow showed the ability and knowledge to use “tools” to retrieve food placed out of their reach in a test run by the Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program.
Vox breaks down how rap lyrics and meter work with or against their underlying beats.
A reader sent over this fantastic cognitive bias cheat sheet, that takes the 175 biases listed on Wikipedia’s page on the topic and organizes them into a much more manageable tree of major archetypes.
The great J. Kenji Lopez-Alt made a lighter take on fettucine alfredo, although I think his version couldn’t properly be called “alfredo” given the modifications he makes. True pasta alfredo contains just pasta water, Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and butter, but of course the result is a rather stomach-unfriendly pile of carbs and fat, and many American restaurants compound the problem by adding cream. Lopez-Alt’s version uses science (of course) to lighten things up and give the dish more flavor.
Another piece on Rob Daviau and how his idea of Legacy games has changed boardgaming. These games involve storylines and permanent alterations to the board and components as you follow the story across multiple plays. Daviau’s latest title, Seafall, is the first standalone Legacy title after Risk and Pandemic got the treatment.
This week the United Nations held a summit to discuss antibiotic resistance, only its fourth summit ever to discuss a health-related topic.
Growing vegetables instead of grass can help reduce greenhouse gases in the air. Also, you can’t eat grass, so there’s another benefit to switching to produce.
Yet another massive price hike for an obscure pharmaceutical, although in this case, it’s not even clear how effective the skin gel is.
The shift to the far right isn’t just happening here – it’s as bad or worse in Europe, with Austria set to elect a far-right President, and Islamophobia and xenophobia becoming major tenets in party platforms.
Courage House, an organization that houses victims of sex trafficking, is being accused of violating the girls’ privacy rights and forcing them to attend Christian masses. I don’t agree with the article’s use of “exploiting” here – in this context, it sounds like they’re allowing the girls to be sexually violated again – but the allegations themselves are disturbing.
The Guardian‘s superb writer Jessica Valenti argues that distrust of Hillary Clinton is a function of our distrust of women in general.
Gary Johnson said in 2011 that fighting climate change is futile because the sun will eventually expand and swallow the earth. This is true, although there’s probably a 3 billion year gap that he might wish to consider. This goes along with an article I tweeted earlier this week, Slate‘s piece arguing that Johnson is not in any sense a “liberal” candidate, and liberals shouldn’t vote for him as a protest vote. I thought the article failed to fully make its case about young voters, but it is correct about Johnson, whose fiscal and regulatory policies would favor higher-income earners and large corporations at the expense of the lower-income strata, especially those with chronic illnesses, as well as the environment.
Charles M. Blow writes in a NY Times op ed that Clinton and Trump are not equal and protest votes are folly. He articulates my own opinion on the subject better than I could.
Joss Whedon’s celebrity-filled anti-Trump, get-out-the-vote ad was probably more funny than effective, but since I agree with the stance on Trump, I laughed quite a bit.
Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle his own legal problems. The Washington Post‘s David Fahrentold has been all over Trump’s phony charity, calling hundreds of alleged beneficiaries to verify donations (with many saying they’d never received a dime). The New Yorker claims Trump’s charity duplicity has become a campaign issue.
Trump may be looking at oil exec and anti-environmentalist Forrest Lucas for Secretary of the Interior. The article has quotes from leaders of the Sierra Club, the Oil Change USA, and the Humane Society. Trump’s ties to oil and gas industry people may mean he fills Cabinet posts typically aimed at balancing corporate needs with the public good of environmental stewardship.
Speaking of which, Trump is a climate-change denier, which doesn’t jibe with rising sea levels on the east coast. The damning quote: “Donald Trump lives in a parallel universe where the facts established by the scientific community to him don’t exist.”
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials continue to investigate ties between Trump’s camp and the Kremlin. I can’t believe this hasn’t become a bigger issue. Russia is a dictatorship where dissent is quashed and journalists are killed for their work, and as their economy continues to shrink they’ll become more of a threat to global stability. Cozying up to Putin should be an automatic disqualifier.
The Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump, but black cops in Philly say the endorsement ignores their views. I have no idea if such endorsements matter at all, but it would seem that any group with a mixed membership will have a minority that feels marginalized by a single endorsement like this.
Talking Points Memo describes the “fever inside” Donald Trump, his arbitrary, impulsive nature and outsized reactions to perceived slights.
Drew Magary wants to say fuck you to Trump voters. Who am I to argue?
I Just Wish NFL Players Could Find A Way To Protest Without Starting A National Dialogue. Yes, it’s from The Onion. Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, Languages, links, nutrition, pasta, rap, recipes, stick to baseball

→ September 17, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/17/16.

For Insiders this week I wrote about eight top 100 prospects who had down years in 2016; that’s not all prospects who had off years, just eight I chose to discuss. I held my usual Klawchat on Thursday. For Paste I reviewed the fun, family boardgame Saloon Tycoon, where players build across their boards and also add up to three levels as they build upward.

You can pre-order my book, Smart Baseball, ahead of its scheduled release on April 25, 2017. I promise I’ll have it written by then.

Several people I know have new books out recently, and while I haven’t read them yet, I wanted to highlight the titles here:
• Jessica Luther’s Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape
• Alan Sepinwall’s TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time (with Matt Zoller Seitz)
• Geoff Schwartz’s Eat My Schwartz: Our Story of NFL Football, Food, Family, and Faith (with his brother Mitch)

I’ve been sending out a weekly email newsletter with links to all of my content and some additional notes or thoughts that don’t fit anywhere else; you can sign up here if you just don’t have enough Klaw in your life.

And now, the links…

Scientific American asked the four remaining Presidential candidates to answer twenty questions on major topics in science and has published the answers of the three who responded. (Gary Johnson hasn’t deigned to reply.) My takeaway: Trump remains a terrifying anti-science candidate, particularly in his denial of climate change (note the scare quotes), while Stein comes off as a serious person here as opposed to the pandering crackpot she’s been playing on Twitter.
VICE’s Noisey site has an outstanding piece on the history and music of Homestar Runner, one of my favorite cartoons from any medium.
BuzzFeed is capable of some great investigative journalism (when they’re not stealing other people’s content on the Tasty or for their videos), like this piece on police departments “closing” rape cases without investigating them. They focus on Baltimore County, Maryland, where even men convicted of previous assaults were getting away with rapes because the cops couldn’t be bothered.
More great investigative journalism, this time from the Houston Chronicle: The backwater known as Texas has been denying special education services to special needs kids because they arbitrarily capped the rate of kids eliglible to receive those services at 8.5%.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker stands accused of, but not charged with, taking cash for favors from large donors, according to court documents obtained by the Guardian despite a court’s irregular order that the documents be destroyed.
Mother Jones writers about the dwindling numbers of black teachers in urban areas and the potential impact on black students.
How did a young power couple in Afghanistan, including the youngest woman in that country’s nascent Parliament, end up in Nebraska? The Omaha World-Herald has their harrowing story, from death threats in their home country to entry-level jobs at McDonald’s and Home Depot as refugees here.
Experts on hate groups say white supremacists see Donald Trump as their “last stand.” Well, when he’s bragging about the 88 military advisors helping him, how could they think otherwise?
I don’t even know what to make of the story that Peter Thiel says Trump will nominate him to the Supreme Court if elected. Thiel is the billionaire who funded the lawsuits that took down Gawker and Nick Denton; perhaps he believes that, but as much as I find Trump as President a horrifying prospect, this seems like Thiel’s own fantasy.
Speaking of Gawker, Univision, the new owner of Gawker Media, chose to delete a handful of posts related to ongoing lawsuits (some baseless); the chief news officer at Univision agreed to a long conversation with Gizmodo about these decisions. It’s long and meandering but there’s a lot of meat in here, and while the deletions don’t look good at a glance, I think Univision is also offering some strong support for its writers going forward, too.
The Scientific Parent explains why the “too much, too soon” anti-vaxxer argument is wrong. It’s ignorant of basic science: Your kid is ingesting more pathogens in a typical day than s/he’ll get in all the vaccines s/he ever receives, and the metals that vaccine deniers freak out over are present in food, water, even breast milk.
Dr. Bob Sears, who’s been accused of ‘selling’ medical exemptions to California’s new mandatory schoolkid vaccination law, may lose his license for medical negligence instead. Whatever gets these charlatans out of the medical business is fine with me.
Meanwhile, nearly 10,000 New Jersey schoolkids skipped vaccinations this year. If you live there, call your state legislator and ask him or her to sponsor a bill eliminating non-medical exemptions.
Trump’s campaign claims he’s given “tens of millions of dollars” to charity but the Washington Post found no proof.
A writer for the National Review claims that the left is “weaponizing” sports, citing the NCAA’s decision to pull championship events from North Carolina as a result of that state passing Hate Bill 2. He drops the ball (!) in sentence two, however, since HB2’s biggest effect is that it local governments from making sexual orientation a protected status in any anti-discrimination ordinances. It’s not about bathrooms; it’s about saying you can’t be fired just because you’re gay.
The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology is chaired by an anti-science Republican and Christian Scientist, Lamar Smith (TX). Physicist Lawrence Krauss writes that Smith’s been politicizing scientific research, including that related to climate change and ocean acidification, in his little reign of terror, which will likely continue as long as Republicans control the House. And don’t be fooled by the religion’s name – Christian Science is about as anti-science as any cult can get, eschewing medicine and claiming that sickness is caused by an absence of “right thinking.”
Media Matters writes about ongoing criticism of the NY Times‘ perceived bias against Hillary Clinton. I’ve always thought of the Times as a clear, left-leaning publication, so their coverage of HRC’s campaign has surprised me this year.
Somalia is a failed state and has been without a real central government for a quarter century now. The northern section of the country calls itself Somaliland, and is seeking internal recognition of its independence. There are some recent examples in east Africa that argue against it, as Eritrea and South Sudan have been plagued by fighting and corruption since their secessions from Ethiopia and Sudan, respectively. Somaliland isn’t leaving a real country, however; there is no competing authority to their own bootstrapped government.
The U.S. ended sanctions on Myanmar, but it’s not clear Myanmar (ex-Burma) has actually earned this economic reward. Aung San Suu Kyi’s acquiescence has left many observers puzzled, and the linked piece from the BBC tries to explain it.
Author Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin)’s address to the Brisbane Writers Festival on cultural appropriation caused a substantial backlash against her claims that the term is the result of “runaway political correctness.”
The Washington Post‘s editorial board wrote that the Hillary Clinton email story is “out of control” relative to its actual importance. I agree; she made a mistake, a significant one, but one that pales in comparison to those of her opponent in this election, such as Trump calling again for Hillary’s assassination.
U.S. colleges continue to protect athlete rapists because sports. At UNC a rape victim went public to force the school and the county to stop delaying their investigation. Two women at the University of Richmond did the same, one revealing that a school administrator said the rapist had a right to “finish.”
New York Knicks guard Derrick Rose stands accused of gang-raping a woman, and Julie DiCaro writes for Fansided about the civil suit that’s going on right now – including his lawyers’ strange choice not to try to settle the case.
Mental Floss shows six math concepts demonstrated via crochet, with the first two (the hyperbolic plane and the Lorenz manifold) the most interesting.
Apple’s been getting killed – rightly so – for the iPhone 7’s lack of an analog headphone jack, but VICE’s Motherboard points out the iPhone 6+ has its own very serious engineering flaw.
Back in the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard researchers for favorable results, part of a decades-long nutritional con that had us afraid of fat but thinking sugar was mostly harmless.
Colin Kaepernick’s protest is working, writes Josh Levin at Slate. Given the widespread conversation he started, I’d have to agree: He used a non-violent, non-disruptive act to make his point, and we’ve spent several weeks talking about all aspects of it, from race in America to the purpose of jingoistic displays at sporting events where many of the players aren’t even from the U.S.
Bayer’s pending acquisition of Monsanto has raised questions about Monsanto’s GM seeds business as some farmers find the returns don’t justify the higher costs. This piece from the WSJ is remarkably balanced, avoiding “frankenfoods!” hysteria and discussing pros and cons of genetically modified seeds. One point of note: Weeds that are or have evolved to become resistant to glyphosate have already started invading farms with GM seeds.
You’ve probably heard a lot about the Native Americans’ opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, which will cross much of their land, but before this NPR piece I hadn’t heard much from the pipeline company’s side. For example, I didn’t know that this pipeline will cover the same route as an existing natural gas pipeline installed in 1982, or that the areas the tribes affected say are sacred may not be so.
Why did the Governor of Kentucky speak before a hate group and threaten armed sedition if Clinton wins? Why does nobody care about an elected official doing this?
Radiolab had a great podcast describing the ordeal of a girl who turned 18 without any documentation to prove she exists. It has taken her over a year just to acquire some of the things we take for granted, and she’s still fighting for a social security number.
A man in nearby Smyrna, Delaware, reports that this relaxing tea better fucking work, according to The Onion.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, gmo, links, rape culture, science, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ September 10, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/10/16.

No Insider content this week, as I was working on my book – including an interview with an executive the other day that ran over two hours and took forever to transcribe – but I did hold a Klawchat because I’m such a nice guy.

My latest game review for Paste covers the five-minute card game 3 Wishes, a very fast-moving with a deck of just 18 cards in a similar vein to Love Letter or Coup.

And now, the links…

The best longread this week was in New York, which profiled a Sandy Hook victim’s father, who went from conspiracy believer to anti-hoax activist.
A close second goes to Vanity Fair for its the rise and fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.
And third place goes to the New Yorker for an incredible profile of NY Times restaurant critic Pete Wells.
A writer for Elle describes getting the call that her abusive, sociopathic father is dying. She doesn’t flinch from the painful parts.
Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo has some thoughts on my former colleague Curt Schilling.
We’re going to get genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida soon, and Mother Jones answers some questions on their safety and efficacy. An ongoing release in the Caymans is showing promise.
The “yield gap” between conventional and organic methods of agriculture is only partially true, and it appears that the dichotomy itself is a false one. Some crops fare better under organic methods, some worse. One question this article raised in my mind: What if a farm used truly organic practices, but was willing to use GM seeds to help raise yields in the absence of synthetic N and with minimal pesticide applications?
Climate change is already leading to coastal flooding in the U.S., and what’s worse, Congressional Republicans have opposed funding for plans to help these areas cope with rising sea levels.
I tweeted and posted on Instagram a photo of a cigarette ad I found in my dilapidated 1973 paperback copy of To Your Scattered Bodies Go. A reader sent along this NY Times piece on cigarette ads in books, which mentions the same ad I found for Kent cigarettes – including their asbestos filters.
This New Scientist piece is kind of garbage at the top, taking a single study to proclaim “There is now a sixth taste – and it explains why we love carbs.” No, there’s not definitely a sixth taste, but one study showed that some people identified a separate taste for carbohydrates independent of the five tastes we know exist.
Buried a bit in this advice column is a great answer to a parent asking about keeping her infant away from anti-vaxers.
A “global vaccine confidence survey” showed that the French are even dumber than we are on vaccines, with 41% of respondents in the hexagon saying vaccines were unsafe. (They aren’t.)
Dr. Bob Sears, a California doctor who has recommended delayed vaccinations and has been accused of (but not proven to have been) selling medical exemption letters to parents, is facing disciplinary action from the California medical board. This is extremely unusual, as these boards are often toothless, but this would send a very strong message to other quacks preaching vaccine denial.
The Harvard Medical School’s Health Blog has a great post arguing that we need to make it harder for parents to refuse to vaccinate their kids. Copout exemptions don’t even force parents to explain their choices to doctors – and hear rational, factual arguments why vaccination is not just smart but necessary.
Deadspin’s Tim Marchman dyslogizes Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative gadfly who preached hate – of gays, of non-Christians, of immigrants, of minorities – for a half-century. My favorite thing on Twitter this week was folks, myself included, posting Schlafly quotes, without adding any comments, and then being accused of speaking ill of the dead before the body was cold. Those were her words, genius. I didn’t have to make her look bad, because she did that all by herself.
A new catalyst might allow us to split water for less energy to get at the hydrogen as a fuel source. But did anyone else see this and think of those “run your car on water!” scams?
Roxanne Jones, who used to work for ESPN (but whom I don’t know), penned a strong op ed for CNN.com saying we need to stop ‘justifying’ men who rape. It doesn’t matter that he was a good kid or had a future or whatever. If you rape, then you are a rapist.
Charles Pierce starts with a quote from At Swim-Two-Birds in his dissection of that Matt Lauer-led farce this week, including a note on the climate change issue I mentioned above.
The corruption of Donald Trump – no surprise, given that he’s a fan of dictator Vladimir Putin – has been subsumed by unsubstantiated claims that Hillary Clinton is corrupt. He gave money to the Florida AG, who then dropped an investigation into Trump University; he gave $35,000 to Greg Abbott’s campaign after Abbott did the same as Texas AG. Vox covered the Florida story, yet somehow the New York Times – a left-leaning publication – couldn’t find room on its front page for this?
It’s probably worth mentioning, with Putin garnering all this praise from Trump (and, one would assume, earning admiration from Trump supporters), that 56 journalists have been killed in Russia since 1992 for reasons related to their work.
Kurt Eichenwald explains that Trump is lying about why he can’t release his tax returns. His tweetstorm on the Clinton Foundation not only claims that there is no scandal over the Foundation’s efforts, but also laments, hopelessly, the increasing irrelevance of facts in political discourse.
The Koch Brothers, who give millions to conservative candidates and causes, stand accused by a whistleblower of knowingly polluting an Arkansas town. This is just one side of the story, but the whistleblower claims to have some fairly damning evidence that the mill in question, run by Georgia Pacific, was dumping a lot of carcinogens and other potentially dangerous chemicals into places where they’d end up in groundwater, and that the mill’s operators knew this and tried to mask the dumping.
Have you seen the Dakota Access Pipeline protest stories? Many seem to focus on the climate-change aspect of the protests, or the use of dogs to fight with protestors, but this is really about Native American sovereignty and a company skirting the rules, doing so with the help of the Army Corps of Engineers until the Obama Administration put a halt to it on Friday.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, hoaxes, links, organic agriculture, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ September 3, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/3/16.

I wrote three pieces for Insiders this week, on the death of September callups, on Yoan Moncada, and on Alec Hansen (White Sox) and Alberto Tirado (Phillies). I also held a Klawchat on Thursday afternoon.

For Paste, I’m going to be reviewing a game a week for the rest of 2016. The latest review is of Mysterium, a fun cooperative game where one player is the ghost and must deliver clues in the form of “vision” cards to the other players. The base game is $36 on amazon, and there’s a new expansion called Hidden Signs that adds more cards.

And now, the links…

Donald Trump bribed the Florida AG to stop an investigation into Trump University, paying the IRS a penalty earlier this year for violating its rules on donations from charitable groups to political campaigns.
Forty years after questions first arose about its safety, triclosan (and similar antibacterial ingredients) have finally been banned by the FDA. How much damage have they already done in increasing antibiotic resistance or harming natural ecosystems that depend on bacterial activity?
The longread of the week is the L.A. Times‘ six-part series (part six runs tomorrow) on the absolutely bonkers story of the framing of a PTA mom. It has to be read to be believed.
Let’s talk Colin Kaepernick, shall we? The NY Times looked into the unnatural marriage of sports and patriotism. The Undefeated’s Domonique Foxworth argued such protests are inherently American. Bay Area sports columnist Marcus Thompson asks what Kaepernick’s critics have done to help veterans beyond standing? It’s a fair question; standing for an anthem or another song is as empty a gesture as you’ll find. And now the Santa Clara Police Union is threatening to stop working 49ers games unless the team puts Kaepernick in his place (my words, not theirs).
If you’ve played Pandemic: Legacy or Risk: Legacy, you have game designer Rob Daviau to thank for the new format. His latest game, Seafall, is the first standalone legacy game he’s designed, and it comes out next month. I met Rob at GenCon – he’s a Red Sox fan, by the way – and am hoping to get a longer demo from him at WashingCon next weekend if my schedule permits. The game looks stunning.
The Ringer is running a lot of content – I think a lot more than Grantland ever did – and quite a bit of it is must-reading. My favorite this week was the profile of deaf model, activist, and DWTS winner Nyle DiMarco, who is using his surprising fame to totally change the way deaf people interact with the rest of society (from both sides, that is).
I’ve enjoyed a lot of the content coming out of VICE lately too, but the Columbia Journalism Review wrote a scathing piece on VICE mistreating its freelancers, including a lot of not paying them.
WrkRiot, a Silicon Valley startup, has collapsed amid serious allegations that its founder committed fraud. What I find interesting about this is that anyone thought Silicon Valley would be immune to the kind of mountebanks that have populated startup-land since the internet bubble began twenty years ago.
I knew none of the history of California City, a planned metropolis that never came to be, before reading mental floss‘ article on the state of the never-lived-in town north of Lancaster and east of Bakersfield.
The College of St. Scholastica, a small Benedictine school in Minnesota, forbade one of its students to talk about her rape to classmates even though – or perhaps because – it happened in Ireland during a study abroad. The school also refused to help her deal with the Irish police. I’d like to know why her attacker wasn’t charged, something that isn’t mentioned in the article, which just implies that the Irish police dropped the ball (and maybe they did).
Massachusetts prosecutors gave 19-year-old Ryan Crochetiere a plea deal where he’ll only get probation for sexually abusing an 11-year-old girl for a year. This came a day after another teenager in western Massachusetts got probation for sexually assaulting two unconscious classmates. What the fuck is wrong with prosecutors there? And is there any chance on earth that Crochetiere doesn’t reoffend?
Gabon, which has been ruled by one family since 1967 (first the father, now the son), rigged an election and bombed opposition headquarters this week. This matters because those are real people getting killed, and, fine, because Gabon produces a lot of oil.
That’s not the only African country in crisis; Burundi, located just south of Rwanda, is experiencing one of its own crises as its President is trying to turn himself into a dictator by evading term limits and violently suppressing the media. Not surprisingly, nearly 3% of the population has already fled to neighboring countries that are ill-equipped to handle the refugees.
The trends on vaccine refusal are terrifying, and now the American Academy for Pediatrics support doctors who refuse to treat such kids. I’m good with this, because I don’t want my daughter near kids who aren’t vaccinated. The simplest solution remains for more states to follow California’s lead and require all schoolkids to be vaccinated unless they have valid medical exemptions.
Bexar County – in Texas, of course – DA Nico LaHood outed himself as a vaccine-denier this week, citing Andrew Wakefield’s debunked study and fakeumentary Vaxxed in a rant LaHood posted on Facebook. It’s not LaHood’s first dive into conspiracy-theory bullshit as he had an even worse rant against Islam two months ago, calling it a “horrifically violent” religion and repeating the hoax that some Muslims tried to set up a “Sharia court” in Irving.
China’s military buildup in the South China Sea, including building artificial islands to enhance their claim of sovereignty, has caused significant environmental damage, especially to coral reefs already suffering from global ocean acidification.
Former NFL kicker Bjorn Nittmo has brain trauma from one devastating hit he suffered on the field, and is showing signs of CTE, living as a vagrant, abandoning his family years ago, and otherwise behaving irrationally. The NFL continues to deny the link between their sport and these traumatic brain injuries; NFL players suffered 199 concussions in 2015, and I assume NCAA and high school players suffered many more.
Donald Trump’s political stances led multiple chefs to withdraw from or avoid putting a restaurant in his DC hotel.
Trump spoke this past week about his desire to revive a program of mass deportation from the 1950s that was known – seriously – as Operation Wetback. He mentioned this in November as well, and at the time NPR broke down the real history of the deadly program, while Fusion gave even more grisly details. The New Republic‘s Jeet HEer went deeper on the topic in April. A subsequent Congressional investigation of the operation called conditions on the deportation vessels comparable to “an eighteenth-century slave ship.” I don’t agree with the call for mass deportations, but arguing for tighter immigration policies is a legitimate political stance. Wanting to starve, torture, or kill them, however, is not.
An academic and trauma survivor wrote an eloquent defense of trigger warnings in the classroom.
A McDonald’s employee in Needham, Massachusetts, got a wonderful sendoff after 32 years of working the fry station.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, boardgames, environment, links, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

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