links — Page 34

→ December 10, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/10/16.

I wrote a bunch of stuff this week to cover all the major transactions before and during the winter meetings, including:

• The Cardinals signing Dexter Fowler
• The Yankees signing Aroldis Chapman
• The Nationals’ trade for Adam Eaton
• The Cubs/Royals trade with Wade Davis and Jorge Soler
• The Rockies signing Ian Desmond
• The Rays signing Wilson Ramos
• The Red Sox trading for Chris Sale
• The Red Sox trading for Tyler Thornburg
• The Giants signing Mark Melancon
• The Yankees signing Matt Holliday
• The Astros signing Carlos Beltran

I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Terraforming Mars, one of the best new boardgames of 2016, and one that will place high on my ranking of the top ten games of the year when that’s published in the next few days.

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…

I doubt there’s been a more important story in the U.S. this past week than the CIA’s conclusion that Russia tried to help Trump win the election, providing hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks while apparently keeping hacked RNC emails to themselves. I truly don’t know where this goes from here.
Meanwhile, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory conceded defeat in this year’s election, ending fears that state Republicans would use a special legislative session and court-packing trick to try to overturn the popular vote. McCrory’s loss appears to have been at least in part due to his support of state HB2, the so-called ‘bathroom bill’ that also banned local ordinances that protected LGBT citizens from discrimination. Texas, learning nothing from this, is trying to pass the same sort of bill in its quest to roll back the clock a hundred years.
Trump’s continued refusal to sell his businesses creates an unprecedented tangle for him and his family, with evidence already mounting that he’s misusing his status as President-Elect to secure new deals for his business.
Mayors of the world’s biggest cities pledged at the recent C40 summit to act against climate change even if Trump won’t.
Does Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense harbor a decades-old grudge against Iran?
Carrier’s labor union leader said Trump “lied his ass off” about his role in keeping the manufacturer’s plant in Indiana.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich had a few things to say to Trump in a CNN appearance this week.
The man behind Ohio’s bill to essentially ban abortion in the state was accused in 2011 by his wife of abusing her.
A deranged man who believes everything he reads on the Internet brought a gun to a DC pizza shop and fired it, claiming he was “self-investigating” the lunatic conspiracy theory that the shop, Comet Ping-Pong, is a front for … I can’t even say it. These people are too fucking stupid for words.
Actress Sofia Vergara is facing a lawsuit from her own embryos, in effect saying she’s denying their right to be born. It’s really a money grab by her ex-husband, but the consequences of a successful suit here are chilling.
South Korea’s legislature has impeached the country’s President over a corruption scandal; she’s suspended from office now while the case goes to the country’s high court.
MTV News has a great profile of the nephew of defeated Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh; Jammeh’s nephew is gay and spoke out against his uncle’s policies against LGBT Gambians and statements like his 2015 promise to “slit the throats” of gay men in Gambia.
Is the key to boosting Nicaragua’s economy getting more women into the labor force?
A Pentagon study showed how the agency could save $25 billion a year by reducing wasteful administrative costs, so the agency buried it.
A study by the American Automobile Association found that drivers who drive on less than seven hours of sleep are much more likely to crash, with the probability doubling from seven hours of sleep to the range from five to six.
What’s the difference between speaking a language and being fluent in it?
For decades physicists have assumed dark matter exists and accounts for much of the universe’s missing mass, but a new theory holds that it’s not real and that its place in physics is replaced by “dark energy,” which produces the gravity (via quantum interactions) that we attribute to the invisible matter.
The New Yorker has a profile of A Tribe Called Quest and their final album, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 and is still in the top 15 three weeks later.
Author Ann Patchett, whose Bel Canto is one of my 50 favorite novels ever, gave the New York Times her guide to independent bookstores for folks who visit such shrines the way many tourists seek out museums or old churches.
Former professional blackjack and poker player Cat Hulbert told the BBC her life story of beating male gamblers who underestimated her in a rambling but still fascinating narrative that explains some of the many lows she hit while playing cards for a living.
You can watch evolution happen in a giant Petri dish in a lab at Harvard where scientists are studying bacteria to see how antibiotic resistance occurs and how we might fight it. (Link includes a five-minute video.)
Tim Grierson and Will Leitch give movie-fan dilettantes like me a viewers’ guide to what movies might earn Oscar nominations. I need to get to the theater.
Give money to food banks, not canned goods. We have a local food bank in Delaware with a rating of 95% or so on Charity Navigator, and they’ve been my main target for charitable giving lately for the same reasons this article lays out.
Doctors at Yale New Haven Hospital saved a man’s life using an old but still novel approach to fighting a bacterial infection called “phage therapy,” where the patient gets a dose of bacteriophages, virii that specifically infect bacteria.
An artist or group of artists calling themselves Anonymouse made a tiny art installation of shops for mice on a street in Sweden.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2016 movies, africa, ann patchett, climate change, evolution, hip-hop, Languages, links, physics, stick to baseball, tin foil hats

→ December 3, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/3/16.

I had a couple of Insider pieces this week, on the trade of Jaime Garcia to Atlanta, the Cespedes contract, the trade of Alex Jackson to Atlanta, and my proposal for an international draft (written before the CBA negotiations ended). I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers Grifters, a “deckbuilder without a deck” that I thought played a little too mechanically.

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…

An important longread from Scientific American: How factory farming is speeding antibiotic resistance, endangering animals and humans alike, while the government does virtually nothing to stop them. The best thing we can all do is buy only meat from animals raised without antibiotics – organic is not necessary for this but it does qualify – or just don’t eat meat. The article also details some of the oppressive conditions in the ‘contract growing’ business of raising animals for food.
Another longread, this time from the Guardian, on Italy’s “ultras,” dangerous gangs of soccer fans who exert unusual control over the sport and are behind much of the violence that surrounds the sport.
I linked to this on Twitter earlier in the week: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote about the disastrous policies of Henry Kissinger in Southeast Asia, which led to millions of civilian and military deaths.
The House Science Committee is notoriously hostile to real science, something that became apparent again this week when its official account tweeted a link to a climate-denial article at a neo-Nazi site.
The FTC finally did something good! They’re requiring so-called “homeopathic medicines” to include a label that says there’s no evidence they work. That’s because they can’t work. Homeopathy, like cupping and acupressure, is just woo.
The Kansas government of Governor Sam Brownback has been an economic disaster, but it’s also been a test tube for voter-suppression tactics, like requiring proof that voters are Americans, even though the state could only identify three non-citizens who voted in the ten years before the law in question was passed.
A junk study claiming a link between vaccines and autism has been pulled following heavy criticism. I doubt that’ll stop deniers from using it, though.
And those same looney-toons think that Donald Trump will be an ally for their cause. Given his actions so far as President-Elect, I think he’ll throw them overboard the moment it’s politically expedient.
A federal judge ruled that counties in Hawai’i can’t ban genetically modified crops because state law prohibits counties from legislating agricultural issues. It’s painted as a win for Big Ag, but it’s also a win for science.
Research by the Pew Center finds that Americans don’t understand the meaning or import of organic or GMO food. Organic food is not more healthful to your body than conventionally-grown food, although it may be better for the soil, and GM food is not less healthful or more dangerous than non-GM food.
Why are some Massachusetts district attorneys refusing to reveal lists of cases they’ve prosecuted, in violation of state public records laws? The Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team is suing to get those records opened. Real journalism still exists, and I think it will matter in the next four years more than it has in decades.
The Daily Beast has a piece on Casey Affleck’s disturbing history of alleged harassment of women, including abusive behavior.
This Washington Post feature on the effort by the San Bernadino terrorists’ siblings to adopt the killers’ infant daughter is heartbreaking.
Rising ocean temperatures resulted in the worst bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef on record. Increasing carbon sequestration in the oceans raises the water temperature and lowers its pH. Both are bad for coral.
I loved the short-lived animated TV series The Critic, especially its crazy movie parodies, so I was thrilled to read this UPROXX conversation with the two creators.
News outlets are belatedly telling their writers not to use the term “alt-right” any longer, because it’s a euphemism for white nationalist, white supremacist, or neo-Nazi.
Another white-nationalist type has started a blacklist website devoted to identifying left-wing college professors, and Emory University Professor George Yancy is having none of it.
Miami Herald writer Armando Seguero absolutely lights up Colin Kaepernick for wearing a Fidel Castro shirt in a column published hours before the brutal, repressive Cuban dictator’s death was announced.
Many folks weighed in on Joe Posnanski’s columns about the WAR discrepancy between Justin Verlander and Rick Porcello; I particularly enjoyed Phil Birnbaum’s explanation of why the Baseball-Reference approach makes sense. You should read Birnbaum’s post, but in essence, he says that we should deduce from Verlander’s performance that he was the beneficiary of help from his defense, even though Detroit’s defense on the whole was not good.
Is the Internet a “failed state” along the lines of Somalia or now Libya? This Guardian op ed argues that the increasing lawlessness online makes it so.
Bloomberg View/Gadfly executive editor Timothy L. O’Brien argues that Donald Trump’s business is not too big to sell, and the President-Elect needs to sell before he takes office.
Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services is a member of a fringe, far-right, anti-science doctors’ group whose positions include opposition to mandatory vaccinations, opposition to abortion, opposition to stem cell research, and opposition to organ donations, and whose journal is “a repository for quackery.”
The Columbia Journalism Review profiles the overhaul and success of the Washington Post in a wide-ranging conversation with two of the digital media company’s leaders – although I think some of what they reveal is less flattering than they think.
Baltimore is attacking street violence by treating it as a public-health problem, not as a typical crime.
Let’s get to the Trump stuff: One potential pick to head NIH is opposed to stem-cell research and faces much opposition even within Republican circles.
His pick for Secretary of Education is a blow to our nation’s science health. She’s also a disaster for church-state separation, proposing more school-choice programs to allow parents to send kids to religious schools using government dollars, and with ties to the ‘intelligent design’ pseudoscience movement.
Reince Preibus confirmed that Trump’s default position on climate change is denial.
That Carrier deal? It shows Trump and Pence don’t understand the constant churn of jobs in our modern economy.
The NY Times editorial board published a blunt column on Trump’s flag-burning tweet saying Mr. Trump, meet the Constitution.
After Trump won the election, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors issued a (symbolic) resolution saying they would oppose much of what he and the GOP stand for. Of course, it’ll matter when they act, or take the feds to court, but I wish more local politicians were so vocal about their opposition.
From June, a great New Yorker piece on just what a colossal scam Trump University was.
Here are a few of the Senate Democrats who’ve spoken out against Trump so far.
A Texas town’s mayor and government just learned it has had an independent housing authority for the last 40 years, which means that department, which had two employees, has had essentially zero oversight and, of course, hasn’t been fulfilling its mission to maintain living conditions in public housing.
The BBC spoke to hyperglots, speakers of many languages, about how they learned and retained so many tongues and why some people seem better able to do so.
A Canadian town’s police department has threatened to force people arrested for driving drunk to listen to Nickelback.
A 19-year-old Guatemalan woman with Down Syndrome has started a clothing line for other women with the genetic disorder.
Tweet of the week:

Quick recap: the new ed secretary is anti-public schools, the new HUD sec'y is anti-Fair Housing, and the new AG is anti-Voting Rights Act.

— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) November 28, 2016

But to that, you can add that the new HHS head is anti-science, and the potential Secretary of State is still on probation.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, climate change, food safety, Languages, links, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ November 26, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/26/16.

Chris Crawford and I ranked and wrote up the top 30 prospects for the 2017 draft, with Vandy outfielder Jeren Kendall at #1. I also wrote posts for Insiders on the Segura/Walker trade, on the Brett Cecil & Andrew Cashner contracts and other moves, and on the Astros’ moves last week. I also held a Klawchat on Tuesday, in advance of the holiday.

Over at Paste I reviewed the new Martin Wallace game Via Nebula, a great, family-level route-building game that we found simple to learn and quick to play.

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…

Some great longreads this week, including this New Republic piece on the ten-year odyssey to identify an amnesiac man.
Another one comes from Bleacher Report, on Aly Dia, who played one infamous game for Southampton FC and has long been suspected of deceiving club officials about his experience to get that spot.
One from VICE, a report exploring the connection between the drug Propecia and serious neurological side effects, with some patients committing suicide after taking the hair-restoration medicine.
And the BBC explores how British police let a serial killer slip through their fingers, likely because the victims were young gay men with drugs in their systems.
In “depressed rural Kentucky,” residents are worrying about Medicaid cutbacks under the GOP-dominated government. Trump carried Kentucky with nearly double Clinton’s vote total, and five of their six Representatives are Republican, with the lone exception coming from the district around Louisville.
Democrat Roy Cooper continues to lead the vote count in North Carolina’s gubernatorial election, but Roy McCrory and Republicans are trying to steal it. If you live in NC, call your state reps, regardless of party, and make sure they know you oppose any attempt to subvert the results of the state’s popular vote.
A Boston Globe op ed urges Washington to get out of regulating organic food, in essence because there’s no clear defintion of “organic.” I’m about 90% in agreement here, but I do think consumers deserve the protection of truth in labeling laws, regardless of which agency is in charge of it.
London has become a leader in cutting food waste via apps that connect people with extra food – restaurants or even individuals – with people and charities who need it.
Chef Tom Colicchio talked to Mother Jones about food policy, hunger, and the incoming GOP government.
An 18-year-old college student in Tennessee has been charged with shooting and murdering his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend while she slept, because she’d ended their relationship. I’m surprised the story hasn’t gotten more coverage – pretty white girl gets killed equals headlines – but perhaps no one wants to ask 1) why he had access to a gun and 2) what this says about our male privilege problem.
SNL Weekend Update anchors Michael Che and Colin Jost have come under fire for some tasteless (and unfunny) jokes about gender identity, and Paste‘s Seth Simons says they should be replaced.
NASA’s notorious paper on the EM Drive has finally been published, and claims that the propulsion system – which appears to break Newton’s Third Law – actually works.
Scientific American wrote in the wake of Trump’s election that he’s as anti-science a President as we could possibly have. Money quote: “A mandate is what you can get away with.”
Jeb Lund (aka Mobute) has a great piece at Esquire on surviving Thanksgiving by actually going out of your comfort zone and talking to people who maybe don’t see the world the way you do.
Dementia rates in the U.S. are dropping as the country ages but researchers don’t understand why.
Why did many Canadian writers, including the ostensible feminist Margaret Atwood, speak out in support of a professor fired for sexual harassment and bullying? You can find more details on the case and the backlash in the Toronto Star.
FBI data show a rise in hate crimes against Muslims and Jews in 2016.
Slate argues that Facebook’s problem runs deeper than fake news, which is that Facebook itself is a media company but Mark Zuckerberg won’t admit or accept it.
Journalist and writer Farai Chideya has a long, thoughtful, somewhat rambling essay on this year’s “call to whiteness,” those who answered the call, and those who chose not to speak out against it.
Trump won because college-educated whites supported him. Ultimately, that is the question Democrats will have to answer: why they couldn’t capture a segment of the electorate that tends to be more liberal (higher education correlates with more liberal/progressive political views).
Trump reportedly pledged support to vaccine denialists at an event in August, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
He also once asked a reporter if it was wrong to be more attracted to his 13-year-old daughter than to his wife, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
This Philly Daily News op ed explains how Trump & Co. will distract America while looting the country and breaking all manner of rules, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet.
Trump continues to piss and moan about press coverage of him, including personally dressing down several reporters in a meeting last week, in case you weren’t sufficiently horrified yet. But at least New York Times columnist Charles Blow called him out on it.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: food waste, links, organic agriculture, physics, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ 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.

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