links — Page 34

→ February 25, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/25/17.

I wrote one Insider piece this week, on how the Mets should handle their rotation, with six capable major-league starters right now, but five of them coming off of some kind of injury last year, from Thor’s bone spurs to Harvey’s TOS repair surgery. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the worker-placement game Ulm, which works fine mechanically but has a theme that’s just so overdone for me.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. The book just got its first official positive review, from Kirkus Reviews.

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

And now, the links…

An oral history of Homestar Runner? An oral history of Homestar Runner! Thanks to my longtime friend Pete for finding this Q&A with the Brothers Chaps.
NPR’s Linda Holmes disagrees with me, saying this season of Top Chef has been especially satisfying. Link doesn’t contain any spoilers for this most recent episode.
Is I Am Not Your Negro the the target of racist vote brigading on user-generated ratings sites like IMDB? I think the answer is pretty obvious given how hard it is to see that movie in theaters.
This September 2015 article gives some background on the making of the Oscar-nominated film Tanna, one of my top ten films of last year.
My former home state of Arizona has decided the First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly and speech are no longer valid, as the state Senate has voted for a bill that criminalizes peaceful protests if those protests eventually turn violent. It’s based on a false premise of paid protesters, but really, it’s a sign that the state is run by white-nationalist extremists, as it was when I lived there.
A Muslim woman who worked for the National Security Council quit after eight days in the Trump White House. A ten-year CIA analyst and NSC spokesman quit after less than a month under the Trump Administration. Neither could stand working for this anti-democratic regime.
The “Blacks for Trump” guy behind the President at various rallies is a former member of a murderous cult with a more recent history of gay-bashing commentary.
A good first-person longread from Pacific Standard‘s Laurie Penny, who spent time on the Milo Yiannopoulos tour bus with the clueless alt-right kids who followed him.
The House Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority plans to bury the Democrats’ resolution to force Trump to reveal his entanglements with Russia, including any conflicts of interest. That Committee includes some of the worst humans in Congress, including outright racist Steve King of Iowa and anti-science Science Committee head Lamar Smith. Check and see if your representative is on the committee and perhaps make a call on Monday about this resolution.
The vaccine-denial movement in Texas has been energized by the election of Trump and other anti-science politicians. Every day I hear political news out of that state, I’m glad I didn’t take a job I was offered there a few years ago.
A math professor at Tufts is trying to fight gerrymandering by arming mathematicians to testify against it, using geometry as the alternative.
I’ve mentioned Universal Basic Income here before, but Finland’s experiment with giving UBI to 2000 citizens is the first I’ve seen of a real-world implementation.
Most of you saw this, I assume, but I’ll pass it on just in case: Hall of Famer Mike Piazza now owns a professional soccer team in Italy, in the region where Parmiggiano-Reggiano is made.
Fortune looks at the search for the perfect sugar substitute, and why artificial sweeteners, sugar alcohols, and stevia have all fallen short.
Speaking of sweeteners, here’s Stella Parks of Serious Eats on why you shouldn’t buy blackstrap molasses unless the recipe specifically calls for it.
If you want a preview of what’s in store for us, Zimbabwe’s longtime dictator Robert Mugabe is now 92, and his wife said when he dies his corpse would still win re-election.
I can’t even do “tweet of the week” any more because there are too many good ones, but this was the one I saved to include here:

I wish i could credit the artist on this. pic.twitter.com/Ao2teFan1U

— Greg Britton (@gmbritton) February 20, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, Cooking, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 18, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/18/17.

For Insiders, I ranked the top prospects for 2017 impact, although we later removed Alex Reyes from the list now that he’s out for the year. I held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

On the boardgame front, I reviewed the light family-friendly game Imhotep for Paste this week; it was one of the runners-up for the Spiel des Jahres last year, losing to Isle of Skye. Last week, over at Vulture, I wrote about some of the best games for couples.

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…

Two great investigative reads this week from the New York Times. First, the already disastrous legacy of the Rio Olympics, which should serve as a warning to future bidders (but won’t). Brazil is still a poor country, and they’re poorer for the huge investments they made in now-useless infrastructure for the Games. Second, the growing water crisis in Mexico City, one of the world’s largest cities, which also happens to be sinking (as is the other contender for largest city, Shanghai).
Baseball and depression collide in this story on the life and suicide of Jake Eliopoulos, a former day-one draft pick of the Blue Jays who struggled with mental illness and took his own life on his fifth attempt.
Speaking of depression, is it possible that it has an actual purpose in evolutionary terms?
Thanks in part to decriminalizing many drug offenses, the Netherlands has a lot of empty prison cells, so they’re using some to help provide temporary housing to migrants and refugees. Our draconian drug laws and privatized prisons have done far more harm than good, and the Dutch and Portuguese present strong models if we ever want to change our policies.
Austin has a new boardgame bar and restaurant called Vigilante, and I need to visit this place, stat.
Phoenix eats news! The folks behind the wonderful Tacos Chiwas are opening a new tamale place right next door. They’re hoping to have it open around March 4th, just in time for spring training.
Claims about yogurt and other probiotic foods are likely overblown, as research indicates that consuming these foods doesn’t alter the makeup of your body’s microbiome. (They may still be good for you in other ways, of course.)
There’s a coffee shop in Brooklyn that sells an $18 cup of gesha coffee, sparking faux outrage over the price. The coffee costs that much because the beans themselves are hard to grow and of especially high quality. If you don’t want to spend that much, you have plenty of other options, from $4 pour-over cups of still-great coffee on down.
This story is from four months ago, but highlights how climate change seems to be causing a rise in ciguatera toxins’ presence in fish. The toxin can be fatal to humans, as it was in this case, and isn’t removed by cooking.
Meanwhile, a woman in Texas is suing Popeye’s, claiming she got a debilitating screwworm infection from their food. The suit may be baseless – as the article points out, food served at 165 or higher wouldn’t have the live parasites – but I posted it to point out that screwworm infections are almost unheard of in the U.S. now because of a government-run program of eradication using synthetic pesticides in the 1950s.
We might be getting closer to a dengue vaccine, according to that editorial by one of the scientists overseeing some of the trials, where he also explains why vaccine development takes so long. (Hint: One reason is that vaccines have to be incredibly safe to be approved.)
Unfortunately, the vaccine-denial movement is gaining traction, spurred on by President This-is-fine-dog’s open embrace of the debunked vaccine/autism claim. The same writer, Vox’s Julia Belluz, also exposed the bullshit agenda of RFK Jr. and Robert Deniro, who promised $100K to anyone who could prove vaccines are safe, which has already been proven. I’d like to see people skip Deniro’s film festival this year as long as he’s making public health threats like this one. (And, Bob, I’m sorry, but the most likely reason your son has autism is that the DNA in your old-man sperm was degraded.)
A new group called 314 Action is trying to get more scientists to run for elected office, because politicians who think they know more than scientists are dangerous. Remember that Republican Congressman Lamar Smith (Texas, where else?), chair of the House Committee on Science is a raging science denier, notably on climate change.
Texas is really pushing hard to turn the clock back a century or more, but their fight with the NFL over so-called “bathroom bills” that strip protections from LGBTQ citizens looks like a battle they can’t win. I’d like to see MLB step up on this one now that a state with major league teams is trying to pull the same crap North Carolina and Mississippi did.
Get ready for a nationwide, GOP-led assault on voting rights. If the majority won’t support your party – as demographic trends indicate is likely – then the way to retain power is to make it harder for opposing voters to cast their ballots. It’s on all of us to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Trump’s assault on the free press included credentialing a pro-Trump/white nationalist blog whose 28-year-old founder has promised to “troll” other media.
It appears that the White House’s failed travel ban, which they’re promising to reinstate, has already hurt American businesses by deterring international travel to the U.S.. Trump promised to create jobs, but his biggest move to date will likely destroy them.
Haaretz argues that Trump is an anti-Semite, and no Jewish person should support him.
Activist Attorneys General in left-leaning states represent one of the strongest arms of the anti-Trump movement, one that this Vanity Fair editorial argues he underestimated.
Author Kevin Birmingham, whose book The Most Dangerous Book, about the writing and publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, was one of my favorite reads from 2016, spoke at length about the great shame of universities abusing “adjunct” professorships, using such de facto freelancers to keep costs down (even as tuition keeps rising, so where’s that money going?).
There was a very strange heist in London last week – thieves broke into a storage facility and stole over £2 million worth of rare books, including one of the original copies of Copernicus’ treatise on the movement of the sun and planets. No one can figure out why they did it, since such books would be impossible to fence, but there’s fascination over their daring way of getting into the building.
This BBC audio segment explores left-handedness’ prevalence and reasons it exists, as well as debunking “ambidextrousness” and explaining how we can be right-footed or left-eyed (like Lisa Lopes).
Alabama is embroiled in its own scandal, as the corrupt Governor appointed the Attorney General who was supposed to investigate him to Jeff Sessions’ vacated Senate seat.
The Oroville Dam evacuations created a temporary surge in refugees, and a local Sikh temple opened its doors to them, building new connections with their neighbors in the process.
Finally, this piece about why liberals are wrong about Trump is a must-read regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, climate change, coffee, food safety, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 11, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/11/17.

No Insider content this week – you’ve had plenty, so don’t get greedy. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the asymmetrical two-player game The Blood of an Englishman, which is based on Jack and the Beanstalk. I also returned to Vulture with a post on eight great boardgames for couples, in honor of Valentine’s Day.

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…

Detroit Tigers owner and Little Caesars founder Mike Ilitch passed away yesterday. Here’s a 2016 piece on the hidden cost of cheap pizza, where reducing prices often means taking it out of workers’ pockets.
One of the best longreads of the week covered how a Huntington, West Virginia, school official improved school lunches contrary to the meddling efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.
Another great longread: how a young Wikipedia editor/admin is fighting back against misogynist trolls on the site.
Eater has a longread, more a collection of shorter pieces than a single story, on the things people will do to hunt and pick rare mushrooms.
As much as I crush the NCAA for some of its policies, they’re leading the fight against anti-LGBT discrimination right now, including a threatened six-year boycott of North Carolina that would cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business over that state’s hate bill HB2, which prevents local governments from passing laws or ordinances protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination.
There’s a potential famine brewing in sub-Saharan Africa thanks to the spread of the fall armyworm, which is devastating crops in Zimbabwe already and may be present in six other African countries. We can talk about organic agriculture all we want, but if a synthetic pesticide stops this worm, it’ll save millions of lives.
Speaking of which, Dr. Paul Offit wrote about how Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring cost millions of lives too, because DDT, while clearly bad for the environment as a broad-use pesticide, is extremely effective at stopping the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria.
Betsy DeVos was confirmed this week as Secretary of Education, but let’s recall the damage she did in Michigan with her charter-school endeavors. I’ve said on here before that I favor at least some school choice, but school choice is not a panacea for underperforming public schools, and her appointment is a potential disaster for public education in this country.
TIME became (I think) the first major publication to run an editorial arguing that it’s time to impeach President Trump. Meanwhile, good journalism keeps coming from unexpected outlets, like Vogue highlighting five things Trump is doing now but for which he attacked Hillary Clinton during the campaign.
Buy stock in telecom giants? The new FCC is going to kill off net neutrality, opening those quasi-monopolies up for greater power to squeeze money from content providers and consumers.
Meanwhile, Republicans across the country are fighting to restrict voting rights, moves that are likely to help their candidates in 2018 and beyond. If you live in such a state, make your voice heard now, before it’s silenced.
Why did House Republicans block a vote on a resolution stating that the Holocaust targeted Jews? Are they so beholden to party that they wouldn’t even vote on a fact?
John Yoo, who was Justice Department official under President George W. Bush and advocated heavy use of executive orders, wrote that President Trump has taken executive power too far. This is like Tony Larussa saying a manager uses too many relievers. And a former National Security Council member also wrote for the New York Times that Steve Bannon shouldn’t be on the NSC.
Are Trump’s opponents falling into his ‘trap’ with their outrage? I don’t know that I agree with this National Review piece’s conclusions, but it’s worth considering that there are still many voters who will nod their heads at his populist moves without considering their consequences.
Is Trump’s fight against the judiciary his Watergate? I doubt it, although there are some parallels.
Marco Rubio has moments where he appears to be one of the few GOP leaders willing to oppose the President or stake out a position near the center, including a little-heard speech he gave this week on the demise of civil disagreements. That’s great, Marco; now vote against your party’s President on something that matters.
Meanwhile, the GOP continues to use the term “fake news” to keep up its attacks on respected, objective journalism outlets, such as Alabama representative Mo Brooks calling the Washington Post fact-checkers “fake news” for pointing out that his voter fraud claims were, well, fraudulent.
Ah, North Dakota, where two Republican legislators said in session that women should spend Sundays taking care of their husbands. Will they face any electoral consequences for this? I doubt it.
Vaccines! There are over 400 mumps cases in Washington State’s outbreak. That’s why Peter Hotez, Ddirector of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, can say that the anti-vaxxers are “winning” in another NYT editorial. (I subscribed to the Times online in the fall, mostly to keep these posts going, because they are producing some tremendous content across the board right now.)
If you saw the Daily Mail piece claiming that politicians had been hoodwinked by falsified climate-change data, well, don’t read the Daily Mail, as it’s become an unreliable source on any economic, political, or scientific topic. And the story was utter nonsense.
Former Top Chef contestant Mark Simmons of NYC’s Kiwiana made his feelings on the Muslim ban quite clear with a pro-immigration message printed on his restaurant’s receipts.
Is artisanal chocolate the next big food trend along the lines of craft beer and coffee? I’m a little skeptical, and this piece glosses over chocolate’s big sourcing issue (there’s a lot of child labor and de facto slavery in the cacao supply chain), but I think there’s a market here for better chocolate that can make consumers feel better about what they’re eating.
An Intelligentsia Coffee staffer wrote this informative post on why we steep tea but brew coffee.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has published research on how to help women and people of color in the film industry, a sort of response to the #OscarsSoWhite criticisms we’ve heard the last few years. (The Oscar nominees are much more diverse this year, quelling such complaints for the moment.) It gets more at the root of the problem than the attacks on the Academy Awards do – you won’t see women nominated for Best Director if women are rarely hired as directors or if their films struggle to find funding or distribution. There were few acclaimed movies in 2016 directed by women; I think the best-reviewed was Certain Women, which received very little distribution at all.
Is mining asteroids an essential part of our future? I think it is, in some sense, although I’m surprised this piece doesn’t mention iridium, a critical element in manufacturing electronics; it’s believed most of the iridium on earth came from the meteor or comet that caused the K/T extinction event.
Vice’s Noisey asked a person with synaesthesia what several songs “taste” like to him. Synaesthesia is a rare brain function where senses ‘cross;’ Vladimir Nabokov had it. I don’t have this, but I do associate all twelve months with certain colors, because when I was maybe five my mom had a Peanuts calendar hanging in our laundry room where January, May, and September were colored in red; February, June, and October in blue; March, July, and November in green; and April, August, and December in yellow. Those months still have those colors to me today.
Humor: This New Yorker fake-dialogue post called “I Work from Home” hit a little close, especially as I’m writing this post at 10:30 am on Saturday while still in my pajamas.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: chocolate, climate change, coffee, links, organic agriculture, pizza, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 5, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/5/17.

My organizational reports for all 30 teams, featuring at least ten prospects ranked for each club (and as many as 25), went up this past week for Insiders. You can find them all here on the landing pages for each division:

• American League East
• National League East
• American League Central
• National League Central
• American League West
• National League West

My list of thirty sleeper prospects, one for each MLB organization, for 2017 went up on Friday, wrapping up the prospect rankings package for the year. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

For Paste, I reviewed the complex strategy game Forged in Steel, a citybuilder with some worker-placement and card management aspects that, once you get the first few moves underway, really gets going and manages to be both smart and fun.

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 must-read piece of the week – actually published in early January – comes from British journalist Isabel Hardman, who wrote about how even England’s vaunted NHS doesn’t do justice to people with mental illnesses, although the piece itself also provides a great window into her own difficulties recognizing what was happening to her and getting properly treated.
It’s Super Bowl Sunday! If you wouldn’t let your kids play football because it’s dangerous (and has led to the premature deaths of many players), is it moral to still watch the NFL?
I thought this New Yorker profile of Evan McMullin, who has emerged as a major Trump critic from the center-right was both an excellent piece of balanced journalism and a good window into someone who, even though I disagree with him on a couple of major policy issues, speaks very clearly to my concern that the man in the Oval Office – well, that man, and the one pulling his strings – needs to be stopped.
The batshit insane people who claim Sandy Hook was a hoax believe Trump’s election furthers their cause. I’m just glad these hoaxers are facing legal consequences when they harass relatives of the deceased.
As if Betsy DeVos’ awful answers in her confirmation hearing and embrace of creationism and other anti-science bullshit weren’t enough to disqualify her from running the U.S. Department of Education in everyone’s eyes except, well, our President and 50 Senate Republicans, she’s also a major investor in an utterly useless pseudoscience business of neurofeedback that claims it can use brain waves to diagnose and treat autism, depression, and why are we even talking about this it is such obvious bullshit? If you have a U.S. Senator who is planning to vote for DeVos – that’s every Republican right now except Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Sue Collins (Maine) – get on the phone on Monday morning, or send a fax, or go to their offices and make it clear you want a no vote on DeVos. One more Republican will end her candidacy, and while we aren’t guaranteed that the next nominee will be better, I’m not sure they can find one who’s worse.
You want more about DeVos being delusional in her belief in anti-science folderol? Look at her use of code words for creationism. While her camp has hidden behind the federal law and court rulings that intelligent design can’t be taught in public schools – it’s religion, thinly disguised as pseudoscience – that opens the door for her to push to change such laws, or challenge the court rulings, to suit her own misguided beliefs.
The House Science Committee is something between a joke and a modern-day Spanish Inquisition, thanks to its science-denialist head, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas, where else?), and the new Holman Rule that allows House appropriations bills to target any federal employee and reduce his/her salary to $1. Boys, all you boys, you think you’re so American.
Is the white-supremacist (and possible fascist) Steve Bannon positioning himself to be the de facto President? Fifty Democratic Congresspersons have called for Bannon’s removal from the National Security Council, co-sponsoring a House bill that would ban political strategists from serving on the council. (Reports that the appointment requires Senate approval were false or at least incomplete.) Meanwhile, filings from Bannon’s second divorce include accusations that he failed to pay child support and was abusive toward his daughters.
I think this ProPublica piece has the wrong title. It’s not can the Democrats be as stubborn as Mitch McConnell, but will they? Of course they can, but so far, I see no signs that they well. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley is prepared to lead a filibuster of Trump’s SCOTUS nominee Neil Gorusch, who’s filling a seat that should have been filled last year by Merrick Garland. (By the way, if you saw the claims that Gorusch had created a pro-fascism club while a student, those were false.)
Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay – that is, a trip to benefit the Trump family business, not on U.S. official business – cost the taxpayer over $97K in hotel bills. This is a good example of where the Democrats need to be obstructionist – Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill requiring him to divest, but even the Dems appear to have little interest in this fight.
How about that immigration order, now halted, that served as a de facto Muslim ban? The Archbishop of Chicago spoke out against it. The order stranded a Brooklyn doctor in the Sudan. VICE published a list of doctors and researchers thus barred from returning to the United States. Don’t you feel so much safer now?
Bloomberg published a short op ed that argues that Trump has failed his Wall Street and big business backers twice over, by putting all permanent resident employees at risk of deportation or refused re-entry, and by failing to repeal the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which – get this – which requires financial advisers to act in the best interests of their clients in retirement accounts. I don’t know what’s worse: that Trump’s camp wanted to repeal the rule, or that the rule was ever necessary in the first place.
The farewell message from Tom Countryman (!), Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, who was summarily dismissed along with five other State Department lifers last week, is well worth your time.
Who’s behind the fake-news site CGS Monitor, which uses real experts’ names in bylines on articles they didn’t write? It could be Russia – I mean, of course it’s Russia, right? – although this piece speculates it could also come from Iranian interests.
This post from “The Jester” on Russia’s infiltration of our federal government pissed someone off enough that the site was hit with a DdoS attack a few hours after the article went up. Within it, he points out that the ex-KGB/FSB official suspected of helping MI6 agent Christopher Steele assemble that dossier on Donald Trump was found dead in his car on December 26th, and the the author accuses the Kremlin of orchestrating his murder.
Republicans are further trying to rig the electoral college system in their favor by pushing blue states to adopt “proportional” electoral voting, which, as that FiveThirtyEight piece explains, means that Clinton could have won the popular vote by five percentage points and still lost the election.
A new law in Arkansas allows rapists who impregnate their victims to stop the latter from getting abortions, or a husband to sue to prevent his wife from doing so, and so on. Even setting aside the clear infringement of religious belief into law here, this is as blatantly anti-woman as you can get. I’ve got one state left to visit to be able to say I’ve visited them all, but you know, I think any trips to Arkansas can wait until they start to treat women like actual people. UPDATE: Snopes has more details on the law, such as pointing out that rapists can’t sue for damages, and that the law delays rather than prevents the abortions. The ACLU is still planning lawsuits.
Abortion is an important, sometimes lifesaving medical procedure, and keeping it legal and available reduces deaths from unsafe abortions, while improving access to abortion and contraception reduces abortion rates overall. Again, women are actual people, and the infamous photo of Trump signing an anti-abortion executive order while surrounded by men sort of says it all – and that’s why the photo of the Swedish Prime Minister trolling Trump is such a thing of beauty.
Protesters plan to shadow Trump whenever he travels so he feels their dislike, an extension of the idea that he thrives on public adulation.
The apparently random murder of a woman walking on a Reykjavik street after dark has shaken the city, which is known for its low crime rate and 24-hour party culture.
I tweeted about this earlier in the week, but donors across the country are helping pay students’ lunch debts. It’s such a little thing, and so easy to do if you have any cash to donate. We called our daughter’s school, asked how much it would take to clear any outstanding tabs, and wrote them a check. You’ll make a lot of families’ lives easier, and will reduce the shame these kids feel for something that’s no fault of their own.
The Brits have all the legislative fun: A Labour MP held up a sign saying “He’s lying to you” behind Nigel Farage in a televised address by the far-right UKIP leader.
The University of Nevada joins the growing list of NCAA football programs reneging on scholarship offers weeks or even days before the official signing day. I’m no lawyer, so I’ll ask the crowd: at what point does such an oral agreement become binding on either party?
I’d never heard of the Chinese delicacy fat choy, a bacteria that grows long, noodle-like strands, but it turns out its farming is harmful to the environment, and the Chinese government is now cracking down on its production and sale.
Recode has a long, fascinating interview with my former colleague Bill Simmons on The Ringer, the rise and abrupt end of Grantland, the demise of his HBO TV show Any Given Wednesday, and much more. I’m still not sure I get the mission of The Ringer; they’ve mixed some great sports content with some head-scratchers where they offer advice to the movie or music industry. But it’s early in the site’s history, and I’m 100% behind any site that supports good journalism and pays its writers.
I’m linking here to a piece I saw on Google’s home page (I think) but that I really thought was trash: you could read 200 books a year in the time you waste on social media. There’s a lot wrong with this piece, but let me highlight two things. One, not everyone is wired for the kind of sustained attention required to read a lot of books, and no one should make someone feel bad because s/he isn’t a book reader. I love finding fellow bibliophiles, but if you don’t read books, you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. Two, his math suchs. He says “typical non-fiction books have ~50,000 words,” which is wrong; that’s under 200 pages, and even Smart Baseball, which I did not want to be too long, runs over 80,000 words. He also says he reads 400 words per minute and assumes that most Medium readers will too; I doubt he reads that fast unless he’s speed-reading, which doesn’t work (you don’t retain what you read as well), because reading 400 wpm would mean reading about 80 pages an hour, which I think would put anyone at the far-right end of the scale for reading speed … or means he’s reading books written for children. I read a lot, and I read fast, and I doubt I read 400 wpm unless it’s something simple and incredibly engrossing, like genre fiction or a Wodehouse novel. So, yeah, if you don’t read 200 books a year or 100 or even 20, don’t feel bad. This article was just stupid.
Is the hunt for paid editors tearing Wikipedia apart from the inside? That seems a bit dramatic, but I think the mere existence of paid editors is cause to retain or recover our skepticism about the reliability of information found on the site.
From McSweeney’s: The Rules of This Board Game Are Long, But Also Complicated. I don’t understand why this is supposed to be funny.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, boardgames, chinese cuisine, evolution, football, hoaxes, links, muslim ban, ncaa

→ January 28, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/28/17.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects went up this week, and my org rankings went up last week, so ESPN set up a landing page that links to all my prospect content. When the individual team top tens and reports go up next week, you’ll be able to reach them from this page as well.

ESPN split my top 100 ranking into five posts this year, twenty prospects per page, so here they are from the top to the bottom:

I held a Klawchat Friday after the whole list was up.

And I even got another boardgame review up, this one of the new edition of the 2000 game Citadels, which is actually designed for 4 to 8 players, with rules variants included for 2 or 3. It’s definitely best with four or more, though.

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…

Aziz Ansari takes Trump to task for his anti-Muslim rhetoric in this NY Times editorial.
The House of Representatives quietly changed a rule that will make it easier for the federal government to sell off national park lands, or to transfer them to the states and let the states sell them.
The Environmental Protection Agency froze its grant programs and slapped a gag order on employees. This is happening all over the executive branch, apparently, such as the adminstration’s “control-alt-delete” strategy on climate change policy. These orders led to a series of “rogue” Twitter accounts that ostensibly will allow employees of those agencies to still leak information to the public – if those accounts are what they say they are. TIME‘s Jeffrey Kluger says Trump will lose his war on science, but doesn’t quite point out that we may all be losers before science eventually wins.
Do you live in Iowa? If so, your state’s GOP is pushing a bill to expand non-medical exemptions to vaccinations for schoolchildren. This is dangerous and utterly baseless. Call your state representatives and senators Monday and tell them to stop this madness.
Do you live in Kansas? That state’s GOP has introduced a bill defining a person’s “sex” by their chromosomes, and of course, they’re pitching it as a “student privacy and protection act,” despite zero instances of any actual violation of the privacy or safety of cis students. It’s flagrantly anti-trans, but, as with all these bills, ignores people who are not born male or female, collectively called intersex. It’s a hate bill, and even worse, it’s government-sponsored religion. Call your state representatives and senators Monday and tell them to stop this madness.
Do you live in South Dakota? Well your state GOP is actively subverting your right to vote on laws, reversing a voter-passed ethics reform package and now trying to double the number of signatures required to place something on the ballot in the first place. Do they run the state for themselves, or do they run it for the people? Call your state representatives and senators Monday and tell them to stop this madness.
Do you live in Pennsylvania? Well your state GOP gerrymandered the hell out of your state, with one district around Philly ranked among the ten “most rigged” districts in the country. This is a tougher change, because fixing it would require an amendment to the state constitution, but still, call your state reps and senators Monday and ask how to fix this so that neither party gets to do this in 2020.
Net neutrality, a fundamental principle of the open internet, is about to die after Ajit Pai became head of the FCC. It’s probably too late to stop this one – Trump’s election made this a fait accompli – I still say call your Representative and Senators on Monday to say you support net neutrality and want the Open Internet Order to remain in effect.
Sean Spicer, Trump’s Press Secretary, has killed the traditional way the media reports on a President.
Two great pieces from Esquire‘s Charles Pierce: on last week’s Women’s March and on Trump’s rabid bullshitting in his interview with ABC News. The latter piece also points out the major, major problem that Trump’s brand of absurdity covers up: A fringe, conservative, and often evangelical wing of the Republican Party is now dismantling social and environmental programs that have been in place for decades. Do most Trump voters know what rights and benefits they’re about to lose?
Dan Savage has revived his 2006 site and fundraising campaign ITMFA, which stands for something you can figure out by clicking. I never believed W was worthy of impeachment, for the record. He turned out to be an unsuccessful President, but that’s wholly different from what we’re facing now.
A neo-Nazi who’d been walking around the University of Florida campus wearing a swastika armband drew protests and was later “jumped” by two men who ripped the armband off him. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t feel too sorry for the guy.
The Guardian looks at the incredible shrinking printed circuit board, which they call the vanishing computer. Intel, AMD, and their ilk are now printing transistors so small and so close together that they’re reaching the physical limits of what’s possible. We can’t make transistors any smaller because we’re at the atomic level here, and that means our devices, which have been increasing in speed and power for four decades, are hitting a wall.
One of the very, very few positives that might come out of a Republican Administration and Congress is a renewed emphasis on nuclear power, which environmentalists have opposed even though it doesn’t contribute to climate change. NuScale Power has applied to build the country’s first small, “modular” reactor, and within that article there’s a mention of a company trying to bring back the molten salt reactor design, which runs on ‘spent’ nuclear fuel from light-water reactors.
A law professor in Alabama fought a traffic ticket and turned it into a constitutional rights question. It’s funny, but also disturbing, given how much the city’s mayor clings to the cameras even after orders to stop using them, in part because a private company is profiting from their usage.
The woman who accused, under oath, Emmett Till of grabbing her fabricated her testimony. She’s now 82, and maybe feels some guilt, but will get away with ensuring that the murderers of a 14-year-old black boy got off scot-free.
Are we entering a post-statistics democracy, where populist distrust of traditional statistics is undermining our society, and traditional methods of gathering statistics may tell us less about our populations than they did in the past?
This piece is from 2013 but was relevant to some Twitter idiocy I encountered this week: we don’t need vitamin supplements, although the supplements industry would like us to think otherwise.
In December, a woman of Indian descent was stopped and questioned by police for “walking while brown,” in her words. One officer questioned if she was here illegally.
In Finland, people drink a milder, possibly more healthful coffee that’s mixed with dried mushrooms. I like coffee too much to try this, and also the article put this song in my head.
Hey girl, Ryan Gosling doesn’t understand how he became a meme.
This Onion article hit a little to close to home: Explanation Of Board Game Rules Peppered With Reassurances That It Will Be Fun. But why pick on Ticket to Ride in the photo, when that game’s rules are easy? Have the authors ever seen the rules for Caverna or Android: Netrunner?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, coffee, environment, hate bills, links, nutrition, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ January 21, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/21/17.

My annual prospect ranking package started to appear on ESPN.com this week for Insiders, with the farm system rankings coming in three separate parts: teams ranked 1 to 10, teams ranked 11 to 20, and teams ranked (sad trombone) 21 to 30. I held a Klawchat here on Friday, after all three parts were posted.

The top 100 itself will roll out over five days this upcoming week, 100 to 81 on Monday and 20 to 1 on Friday. I will probably chat Friday afternoon again so that you have the whole list available to you before I take your questions.

Over at Paste I reviewed the really adorable boardgame Kodama: The Tree Spirits, a great family game with a new mechanic that almost feels a little artistic.

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, where, I kid you not, someone actually told me “you should stick to baseball” in response to the last edition, because apparently I can’t talk about whatever I want to talk about in my own fucking newsletter

Gah. The links:

Man Boasts Of Sexual Assault, Later Inaugurated 45th President Of United States. Not The Onion.
Journalists covering President Trump are in for a hellish experience, one where he’ll abuse and attack reporters whose coverage he dislikes, and where he’ll simply lie his way past serious questions. Best of luck. We’re all counting on you, so no pressure.
The New York Times interviewed numerous women who voted for Donald Trump. The answers are all different, yet all horrifying – the rationalization, the economic ignorance, the invocations of the paradox of tolerance, and so on. Yet the message is fairly clear – the Democratic Party did not do a good job convincing enough voters that Trump’s policies were harmful. Either they didn’t have the right messaging, or they didn’t reach enough people, or both. But we can’t blame voters – even when they say dumb things – for not voting the way we wanted them to.
I’m writing this as the global Women’s Marches are ongoing, and enjoyed seeing that even a small group of visitors to Antarctica are participating.
A reader of mine wrote this humorous op ed on why Trump’s vaccine-denialist pandering angers even nice doctors.
Longread: The Atlantic looks at Iceland has curbed substance abuse among teenagers. Quick summary – it’s complicated, and it involves parents stepping up their efforts.
A long-running lawsuit against Cargill and Nestle over turning a blind eye to child slave labor on African chocolate plantations may finally get its day in court, and if this does nothing more than scare large chocolate manufacturers into ensuring their suppliers don’t use slaves, that would be a positive outcome.
Actress and activist Ashley Judd gave a TED talk in October about online misogyny, and within it argued video game developers must wipe misogyny from their games and that all tech companies must fight sexism in the workplace. (The entire TED talk is embedded in both articles.)
Everyone seemed to mock Betsy DeVos’ answer to the question about guns in schools during her confirmation hearing, but did that cause the reporting to miss just how crazy and/or unprepared she was?
Speaking of Ms. DeVos, in this 2014 piece Jeb “Mobute” Lund looked at the 15 worst owners in sports, including the DeVos family, who own the Orlando Magic.
A reader sent along this link on how research into turmeric’s medicinal properties was a waste of time, because the molecules within it (curcumin) that show anti-inflammatory properties on their own don’t do so within the body.
Shake Shack has pledged to source all its chicken according to higher animal welfare standards … by 2024. I understand these things take time, so overnight promises are worthles, but seven years for a company that doesn’t even sell that much chicken? Within the piece, however, it says all the eggs they use are now from chickens raised cage-free, so at least they have a history of meeting such goals.
I wrote my thoughts on season 4 of Sherlock earlier in the week, but EW interviewed showrunner Stephen Moffatt about the season and the finale as well, and he offered some truly cringeworthy comments on the Molly sequence in that last episode.
The national soccer team from Timor-Leste was kicked out of the Asian Cup for using Brazilian players with fake documents.
I love a good strategy boardgame, but this five-hour, £175 game now on Kickstarter is beyond my tolerance for the genre.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, chocolate, food science, links, rape culture, sherlock, soccer, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ January 14, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/14/17.

I’ve been writing Top 100 stuff (and making related phone calls) all week, so the only content I wrote that didn’t appear here on the dish was my review of the boardgame DOOM, an adaptation of the 1990s first-person shooter video game and an update of an earlier attempt to make a boardgame of it.

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 Guardian says turning Sherlock into James Bond is unacceptable, and I largely agree – this season’s first two episodes had too much action and gunplay and not enough Sherlockian deduction.
Also, if you’ve seen the Sherlock season opener, the showrunners spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the surprise ending and their vision for the series.
The Internet of Things leaves us all vulnerable to hackers in ways we don’t expect, like controlling cars remotely via malware or over wireless networks.
Let’s talk vaccines. The Director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Center wrote a garbage, anti-vaccine editorial on Cleveland.com that brought up the discreted vaccine-autism link. Why is anyone surprised, given the Cleveland Clinic’s embrace of other forms of woo like naturopathy?
Donald Trump met with noted vaccine-denier RFK Jr., who is batshit insane on this topic, and conservative writer Ben Shapiro gave us eleven reasons why Trump is wrong to buy into this crap.
Seth Mnookin looks at how RFK Jr. “distorted” vaccine science, although I’d call it flat-out lying.
What can the vaccine-denial movement teach us about improving the public’s science literacy? Unfortunately, one of the author’s conclusions is that denialists manipulate parents with appeals to emotion like making it a “freedom of choice” issue, whereas scientists tend to avoid such irrational efforts.
What’s behind the 2016 spike in mumps cases? One response might be to get a third dose of the MMR vaccine, as the mumps component may gradually lose effectiveness over 10-15 years.
The Ringer looked at noted vaccine-denialist and all-around quack Dr. Joseph Mercola, who makes over $10 million a year from his so-called “alternative health” sites.
Mercola’s site has “4,400 articles on the benefits of turmeric.” Too bad research on the benefits of turmeric (specifically curcumin) keeps coming up empty.
This notice to parents from an Alabama pediatrics office is absolute pro-vaccine gold.
WIRED has an oral history of the making of the ESPN documentary O.J.: Made in America, which seems likely to get least get a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars.
Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims he invented e-mail and files nuisance lawsuits against sites that dispute this, is now suing Techdirt for the same thing, a lawsuit that could put the site out of business. He’s backed by billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel, who also backed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. Ars Technica has a little more detail on the suit, and on why Ayyadurai is wrong. Lots of folks responded to my tweet about this by saying, in essence, that Gawker got what it deserved, but 1) that’s irrelevant to this case and 2) Gawker only posted the Hogan video after a federal court ruled it was newsworthy, making the results of Hogan’s lawsuit hard to explain.
Derrick Goold wrote about a novel type of elbow surgery that may bring Seth Maness back to the big leagues in about half the time it would have taken after Tommy John (ligament transplant) surgery. Maness’s tear was in the right location, near an attachment point, and the ligament was otherwise in good enough shape that he qualified for the new procedure.
Rye bread – I mean real rye bread, the dark, nutty stuff, made with whole-grain rye or even rye berries, is making a comeback. It’s a lower-gluten relative of wheat, so breads made primarily or wholly with rye flour tend to be denser than wheat breads, but I think rye has a more interesting, complex taste than commercial whole wheat flours.
I figure most of you have seen this, but just in case, GQ had a great longread on the diaries of a HS football player who killed himself after suffering from concussion-related CTE. He left detailed instructions for his parents to spread the story of what football did to his brain. It’s a wrenching read, and I wish someone would wallpaper Roger Goodell’s office with it.
Have you seen those cheesy infomercials for MyPillow? Well, the owner may have broken the law with his neverending “buy one get one free” promotion, which also cost the company its BBB rating. It’s kind of a story of the owner’s arrogance, figuring that if something works for his business it must be OK.
Princeton Professor Cornel West reflects on what he calls the sad legacy of President Obama. It’s worth reading, but the essence is that the practical results of Obama’s policies were not progressive enough for his supporters on the left.
There’s real hope for the first time in the forty years since the island’s division that Cyprus could be reunited via a tripartite peace deal, although Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan later dismissed the possibility of a full Turkish troop withdrawal from the divided island. (Given the history of both the Turkish and Greek governments in Cyprus, I kind of don’t blame him.)
Climate change is causing China’s largest desert to expand at an alarming rate, displacing people and turning thousands of acres uninhabitable.
With climate-change denial the official policy of the President-Elect and the party that controls both houses of congress, a new group is trying to recruit scientists to run for office so that we get some rational thinking in our government.
A North Korean boy who was abandoned by his parents and lived on the streets of Pyongyang shared his story with the BBC, including his eventual escape to South Korea.
Russia’s parliament moved to decriminalize domestic violence this week.
And now, to the outhouse … The Trump-Russia connection became more sordid and problematic this week, as the BBC’s award-winning Paul Wood explains in a measured piece that doesn’t quite go as far as BuzzFeed did in revealing the documents.
Charles Pierce explains how no one knows what comes next. He compares Trump to Captain Ahab, but I think he’s more Captain Queeg.
Trump’s plan to name his son-in-law Jared Kushner to a key advisory post is his first attempt to ignore the law, specifically a 1967 law that prohibits this sort of nepotism. My fear isn’t that he’ll do it, but that no one will challenge it.
Betsy DeVos, a creationist nutjob who gave a lot of money to the GOP and coincidentally has been nominated to be our next Secretary of Education, conveniently “forgot” a $125,000 donation she made to support an anti-union ballot measure in Michigan.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: bread, climate change, links, sherlock, vaccines

→ January 7, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/7/17.

I’ve been working on the top 100 prospects package, which begins a three-week rollout on January 18th, since New Year’s, so I didn’t write anything for Insider this week. My boardgame reviews continue, with a review of the Celtic-themed game Inis for Paste and a review of the boardgame and new iOS app for Colt Express here on the dish. I did hold my regular 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…

Several former Justice Department lawyers penned an op ed claiming that Jeff Sessions is lying about his involvement in civil rights cases. They say, “Sessions knows that his real record on race and civil rights is harmful to his chances for confirmation. So he has made up a fake one.” In a rational world, that would end his nomination for Attorney General.
Venezuela’s ongoing political and economic meltdown may lead to a recall of president/dictator Nicolas Maduro, but he appointed a successor this week in new Vice President Tarek el Aissami, who is (or was) under investigating by U.S. authorities for drug trafficking.
Author Ryan Holiday wrote an insightful, somewhat angry piece on the ‘online diversity police’, folks who immediately decry the lack of diversity on any list or grouping (often inaccurately, as it turns out).
Lindy West wrote one of the week’s best, most important essays, on why she left Twitter after six years on the service, citing the endless abuse and the rise of neo-Naziism.
The Daily Beast exposed the long con of 55-year-old “millennial” comedian Dan Nainan, who tries to pass himself off as 35 and has fooled several media outlets as such.
Esquire has a longread on former Deadspin and Gawker EIC A.J. Daulerio, whose career was derailed by the Hulk Hogan sex tape lawsuit.
Grierson & Leitch each posted their top ten films of 2016, along with a 100-minute podcast where they reveal their lists to each other and discuss them. As usual, Leitch’s list comprises fairly well-known films, while Grierson’s has several films I’ve heard of and three that may not actually exist.
The eight-year-old transgender boy kicked out of a New Jersey Cub Scouts group after other parents complained talked to the Jersey Journal, as did his mother, about what happened, in a piece that also explores the psychiatric community’s evolving understanding of “gender dysphoria.”
Jill Saward’s death didn’t garner much coverage here either, but she was an important figure in the movement for sexual assault victims’ rights, as the first British rape victim to waive her right to anonymity and publicly discuss her case.
Will Trump’s election mark the return of civil disobedience? So far it has, but can the various movements opposed to the Republicans’ reactionary agenda keep it up for four or more years?
Let’s talk about the Russian hacking operation, which a US intelligence report says Putin ‘ordered’ to get Trump elected. David Remnick weighed in as well.
The Seattle Times called out Trump’s “reckless linkage” of vaccines to autism, desperate overwhelming evidence that there is no link.
Lauren Duca of Teen Vogue has quickly become one of the most important voices in political journalism, thanks to pieces like this one about the family selling access to the President-Elect at a party at Trumo’s Mar-a-Lago resort that made over $420K.
Republican Christine Todd Whitman headed up the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush, but she said she fears for the planet under a Trump regime for many reasons, including his denial of climate change.
The Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel outlines the Republican Party’s plan for a “sweeping conservative agenda” now that they control the White House and both houses of Congress. I’d dispute the word “conservative” here, though; this is very much an agenda written by and for white Americans, especially Christians, but doesn’t bear much resemblance to the traditional economic and libertarian-minded conservatism of Reagan or Buckley.
The political crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo hasn’t gotten much attention here amidst our own, but President Kabila hasn’t signed the agreement to end his rule, which has been marked primarily by his looting of the country’s coffers of millions of dollars.
Finally, the Huffington Post made news of nothing with a piece on Mark Zuckerberg apparently becoming an ex-atheist. I’m linking this for one major reason – my disdain for the need to classify people by their religious beliefs, something I first encountered on Wikipedia maybe a decade ago, where articles on people can be categorized by the subject’s religion. You can change your religious beliefs on a dime; you can lie about them (in many countries, you may have to); you can fail to fit in any neat bucket of beliefs. As a general rule, I don’t think your religion is any of my business unless you wish to make it so, so I particularly dislike the idea that you need to know what someone believes or, as in this case, that a possible change in the beliefs of a famous person are somehow newsworthy. I’ll be happier when Zuckerberg’s beliefs include extirpating fake news sites from Facebook.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, frauds, links, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ December 31, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/31/16.

No Insider pieces and no Klawchat this week, between the lack of MLB activity, a little holiday-related travel, and me just generally taking it easy this week. I did review the boardgame City of Spies: Estoril 1942 for Paste, and have reviews coming up for Doom, Kodama, and Inis.

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…

Texas is making rapid progress in becoming the nation’s worst backwater, from anti-gay laws to wiping out abortion clinics to reducing environmental protections to a statewide cut in special education resources, as detailed in this Houston Chronicle investigative report on how tens of thousands of disabled children in Texas aren’t getting the education help they deserve.
This New York Times profile on an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD who was convicted of a home invasion highlights how little we do for soldiers returning from active combat duty, and how costly the war in Iraq has been in human lives.
I thought the Telegraph had the best piece on George Michael’s career, life, and death at age 53, possibly the result of a heroin addiction. If you haven’t heard his 1990 album, Listen Without Prejudice, Volume 1, it stands up incredibly well today for its mixture of styles that, at the time, was seen as a disappointment by fans who wanted him to remain a bubblegum pop star. And the same publication also wrote how horrible Gene Kelly was to a 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds during the filming of Singing in the Rain, and how Fred Astaire came to the rescue.
Security expert Bruce Schneier, who coined the term “security theater” to refer to all the things we do to appear to make our lives safer, points out that TSA Pre-Check also won’t work, as it just provides a second way for a would-be terrorist to beat the system and get on a plane. He links to a former TSA administrator’s post explaining Pre-Check’s vulnerabilities, but the two disagree on the solution – Schneier wants less pre-flight screening for everyone, rather than for a select few, saying that terrorists are going to pick ‘clean’ operatives no matter what we do.
This longread on Olympian Debbie Thomas’ descent into mental illness and poverty is from March, but I just found it this week and it’s one of the best and most awful stories I’ve read in the last few months. Thomas won a bronze medal in Calgary in 1988, became a doctor, but has lost everything in the last few years as a result of bipolar disorder.
Donald Trump took credit for Sprint’s decision, made in April, to add 5000 jobs in the U.S., and here’s a partial list of media outlets who repeated his lie in headlines without pointing out its untruth. Yes, there’s more to an article than a headline, but I know from experience many people will read the headline and then move along … but will still send me an angry email about a headline I didn’t write. (Editors write headlines, not writers.)
A New York Times investigation found rampant bribery among Homeland Security officials charged with protecting our borders. I doubt there’s a simple solution to this: no private or public entity will pay agents more than defeating the security is worth to those trying to do so.
The same Russian hacker group that has been accused of trying to influence our election placed malware on a computer at the main electric utility in Vermont, raising concerns about an attack on our infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the Russian government has also been supporting far-right movements across Europe in an attempt to destabilize EU states, finding success in Hungary, Estonia, and Bulgaria, along with the rise of the neo-Nazi National Front Party in France.
“More than a third of the almost 200 people who have met with President-elect Donald Trump since his election last month, including those interviewing for administration jobs, gave large amounts of money to support his campaign and other Republicans this election cycle.” So begins this Politico story on the rising kleptocracy in Washington, where money buys you direct access like we haven’t seen in decades (under either party).
Another neo-Nazi group is planning an armed march in Whitefish, Montana, where its founder’s mother lives. There’s more background, and information on the community’s response, in this audio piece from NPR, which describes businesses putting menorahs in windows to show support and solidarity this week.
Jane Coaston of MTV.com looks at the roots and insolubility of the Syrian civil war.
New York issued the first (known) birth certificate for an intersex person – that is, one that states the person’s sex as “intersex,” referring to someone born with physical and genetic characteristics of both sexes, often including sexual organs. This is law catching up to science, but I ask you, North Carolina and Texas and Mississippi and every bigot out there trying to make life miserable for people unlike you: What bathroom would you like her to use?
In 2018 and 2020, remember how the Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing to even hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, nominated to fill that vacancy by President Obama.
The political crisis in Burundi, sparked by the questionable re-election of Pierre Nkurunziza to a third term as President, was not helped when he hinted he might run again in 2020. The Burundian constitution limits the president to a single re-election, and his decision to run roughshod over that clause led to 500 deaths and over 300,000 refugees leaving the country.
An open letter from 23 activists, many of them Nobel laureates, calls for the UN Security Council to stop ethnic cleansing in Burma against the Rohingya minority – and criticizes Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi for her inaction on this issue.
That Gambian election a few weeks ago that appeared to end the tyrannic rule of President Yahya Jammeh? Yeah, well, so much for that, as Jammeh is trying to annul the results and declare himself the winner. Senegal, which surrounds Gambia on all but the latter’s tiny coastal border, has said a military intervention is only a “last resort.”
Fortune looks at the recent spate of frauds among tech startups, asking whether this is a growing trend giving the amount of VC money flying around.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, links, neo-nazis, ptsd, stick to baseball, texas

→ December 24, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/24/16.

For Insiders this week, I wrote up Cleveland’s deal with Edwin Encarnacion and the Clay Buchholz trade, as well as a piece last Saturday on some potential problems in the new CBA. I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

My first-ever piece for Vulture ran this week, a holiday gift guide to boardgames for gamers at various levels (including newbies to the hobby).

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…

The most important piece I read this week came from Michael Shermer, author and editor of Skeptic, who wrote about how to convince someone who refuses to accept facts. I think his core point – that people who reject, say, evolution or climate change are doing so because it challenges their worldview, especially religious ones – is entirely valid, but he doesn’t tell us what to do when the President-Elect and his entire Party appear unwilling to accept facts.
The Indianapolis Star has a lengthy investigative piece on how a child-molesting gymnastics coach continued working with kids for 20 years, working in a dozen gyms across four states before he was finally arrested and charged … and the parents of kids in that last gym came to his defense before he confessed. It’s a story of our failure to believe victims, of fear of liability, and of passing the buck instead of standing up to stop a dangerous predator.
The Charleston Gazette-Mail ran a two-part series on how drugmakers happily poured opiates into West Virginia despite evidence that there was an epidemic of addiction in the state. It’s a simple story of greed, corruption, and a stunning lack of empathy for the victims.
Deadspin’s The Concourse has a great piece on how technology isn’t going to turn Saudi Arabia around. The core message here, I think, is something I’ve believed for twenty years: the Saudis are not our friends, and the foreign policy of both parties and every Administration for the last forty years isn’t helping us or the Saudi people.
White supremacists led by Richard Spencer are causing hell in Whitefish, Montana, including targeting a local business owned by a non-Jewish family with a “Jewish-sounding” name.
Twitter trolls have a new tactic – sending seizure-inducing images to people with epilepsy, such as journalist Kurt Eichenwald.
Tucker Carlson gets called a “partisan hack” – rightly so – when he tries to shame a journalist for doing her job, and doing it well.
Ohio Governor John Kasich, who was one of the more moderate candidates for the Republican nomination (by comparison), signed bills this week allowing concealed carry in day-care centers and blocking local minimum wage laws.
I feel like everyone saw this, but it was one of the most entertaining things I saw all week: Many people remember a movie called Shazaam, starring Sinbad, that doesn’t actually exist.
Paul Krugman’s NY Times piece on how republics end was widely shared this week, seen primarily as a commentary on the Trump regime (which in some level it was), but he specifically cites the cut block executed by Republicans in North Carolina, which is rapidly becoming one of the nation’s biggest backwaters, heading down same path as Kansas.
The Kuwaiti embassy appears to have moved a major event to the Trump Hotel in DC to curry favor after members of the Trump team pressured them to do so. This is not normal.
Trump’s sons were caught earlier in the week using a Texas non-profit to sell access to the President-Elect in echange for million-dollar donations. His sons now won’t attend a particular fundraiser that raised these suspicions, but the connection is still there.
Trump’s national security adviser met with the head of Austria’s neo-Nazi Freedom Party, founded by ex-Nazis in the wake of World War II. This also is not normal.
The ACLU explains one possible workaround to the Electoral College problem, although I doubt there’s any movement on this front until Democrats control more state legislatures.
Why has Pakistan jailed a Christian woman on dubious blasphemy charges for five years? Like the Saudi government, the Pakistani government is not our ally, not if they use our desire to work with them against the Taleban as air cover for persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims.
Quartz reviews a new type of neurological study (they call it “brain health,” which seems facile) that somewhat predicts future criminal behavior for toddlers. The headline is clickbait; they’re saying that toddlers who score low in this type of test are more likely to engage in criminal behavior as adults. That’s a correlation, not a full-on prediction and not definitive by any means. But it raises no end of ethical and policy questions, not least of which is whether we should test all kids to identify those at risk so that they get early intervention, but with the likelihood that they’ll be tagged for life as such?
A junk study in Japan that claimed to have found a link between the HPV vaccine and certain adverse events has prompted demands for the journal to retract the paper.
I love The Muppet Christmas Carol, and now my daughter does too, so it’s an annual tradition for us to watch it. Mental floss had one of its trivia posts on fifteen odd facts about the film, including why the famous “When Love is Gone” scene is rarely found on home video releases.
Great piece from Indy Star writer Gregg Doyel on Grayson Allen’s behavior and the need for real, personal change, based on Doyel’s own experiences.
A football player in Idaho walked free on sodomy charges despite assaulting a teammate with a wire hanger, enough to cause internal tearing. The player was white, the victim black and developmentally disabled. The player won’t even have to register as a sex offender because the prosecutor didn’t think it was warranted. I see this stuff and, you know what, maybe we should just split the country in two, because if you think this shit is okay, then maybe we shouldn’t be in the same nation.
I thought Moonlight was outstanding, and the BBC wrote about how the film is making an unlikely romp through major critics’ awards, despite being a low-budget independent film about a black, gay male character at three stages of his life.
A South African cafe is making Nespresso capsules of one of the world’s most expensive coffees, which are catching on as the market of people who want the convenience of pod coffee is spawning a segment that wants coffee that doesn’t taste like swill. That’s great, except pods are an environmental nightmare, creating way more trash than other methods, which typically produce entirely compostable output (like pour-over).
Physicists managed to hit antimatter particles with a laser, the first time such an experiment has succeeded – mostly because antimatter doesn’t last very long in the presence of matter. One of the mysteries of our universe is how we ended up with more matter than antimatter during the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, which is why anything exists in the universe today.
The livestock industry keeps talking about reducing antibiotic use, but it’s not happening, at least not yet.
“Thank God Nigel Farage has the courage to take a stand against whining do-gooder Brendan Cox,” writes Independent columnist Mark Steel, taking aim at the Brexit Muppet’s attacks on the widower of British MP Jo Cox.
Science fiction has offered its share of dystopian futures, several appearing to predict the rise of a Trump-like fascist leader, including an Octavia Butler story that had such a character promising to “make America great again.”
I’ve been to Bermuda three times but never knew why their roofs are shaped as they are, with stair-like patterns. It’s because the island has no real source of fresh water, and the roofs allow for more efficient collection of rainwater. The piece also talks about Bermuda’s culture of water conservation and how tourism and increasing population density threaten it.

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