maine

→ November 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/23.

Nothing new from me at the Athletic as I wait for some real news, a trade or signing, that I can break down. I’ve also begun the offseason prospect work, although those rankings won’t run until late January or early February.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the wonderful game Fit to Print, which has a real-time aspect like Galaxy Trucker where players grab various tiles, then some tile-laying like Patchwork, as players try to fill out their woodland newspapers – with some hilarious text and art on the tiles – with articles, photos, and ads, playing over three rounds to represent three days of issues.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road and The Lost Girls, primarily about the first book, which deals with a family where six of their twelve children developed schizophrenia, although we touched on his update to the latter since the case may have been solved. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I also appeared on NPR’s Marketplace, talking about Moneyball and the data revolution in baseball in the last twenty years. You can catch it on iTunes on the Marketplace Tech podcast.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last Saturday and will do another this weekend as I try to make this a weekly thing, although I might shift to Monday since that tends to be the slowest day of my week (in more ways than one).

Two longreads from ProPublica: The first is an appalling story of how white Louisiana judges on the 5^th Circuit decided to deny all petitions from prisoners who couldn’t afford attorneys, many of them Black men who claimed they were unjustly convicted – over 5000 such petitions in total, over a period of 12 years. It first became public when the staff director for the court wrote a confessional note before killing himself, but the judiciary managed to clamp down on the story and there have been no consequences for any of the judges or others involved. Oh, those prisoners still had to pay the $300 fee to file those petitions that judges wouldn’t even read. Many of the affected prisoners are still incarcerated.
The second looks at the twenty farming families who use more than half of the water taken from the Colorado River by farms, and 1/7 of all of the water that flows through the river’s Lower Basin each year.
Climate change is pushing the insects that spread tropical diseases further north, into Europe and the United States. Europe had as many cases of dengue in 2022 as they did in 2010 through 2021 combined. California just reported two cases of local transmission last week.
Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian wrote the best piece I read this week on the Israel-Hamas war, arguing that both sides have to fight their own extremists to get us to a sustainable peace.
BlueTriton, the company that owns Poland Spring, quashed a bill in Maine’s legislature to cap the length of water-pumping contracts at seven years. A lobbyist for BlueTriton wrote an amendment that friendly legislators introduced, killing the bill.
Just a day before they got spanked in school board elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania, the pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty demanded that Florida cops arrest a school librarian because there was a fantasy novel that they alleged had risqué content available in the school library.
Hold your surprise: Nine of the 12 members of a Congressional committee that advises the nation on its nuclear strategy have financial ties to weapons manufacturers.
Wounded Falling Bird Ron DeSantis (R) removed commissioner Oren Miller from office in The Villages from office in 2021 after Miller fought a property tax that benefited a local developer, then forced a bogus perjury charge against Miller as well. A three-person panel of Republican judges not only threw out the conviction, they ordered the lower court to find Miller “not guilty.”
Also in Governor WFB’s Florida, the plan to remake the tiny, once-liberal New School into a bastion of conservative something will cost taxpayers $600,000 per student.
The NY Times’s Katherine Miller looks at Nikki Haley’s campaign, and how her fight against Trump may turn “brutal.”
Did anyone else notice that Trump threatened to call in troops to put down protests and arrest dissenters if he wins the Presidency next November?
A student at the University of Pennsylvania who had Long QT syndrome, a form of cardiac arrythmia, died after having a Charged Lemonade at Panera, as she was unaware that it contained as much caffeine as four cups of coffee. Her family is suing, and Panera has added new warning language around the drinks. I go to Panera probably 4-5 times a year, and I’ve seen those drinks, but I had no idea they had that much caffeine, which is more than I have ever had in a single day in my life as far as I know.
Parents demanding that their kids skip once-mandatory childhood vaccinations are doing so at the highest rate ever, raising the risk of outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles and mumps.
Yusef Salaam, one of the falsely accused Central Park Five who was arrested at age 15 and served nearly seven years in prison before his exoneration, was elected to the New York City Council on Tuesday.
Your second COVID-19 infection increases your risk of getting long COVID, and it appears to also increase the odds that you never fully recover. Less than 10% of Americans have gotten a COVID-19 vaccine booster this fall. I did, and you should too. Also, now I’m magnetic wheeee!
Paper straws are everywhere in the UK, but they’re not clearly better for the environment than plastic ones. How about you just skip the straw if you’re able and we save them for folks who require them?
Israel has killed yet another Palestinian journalist, appearing to target Mohammad Abu Hasira this week, running the count of journalists killed in Gaza to at least 37.
Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid used Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7^th as an argument to urge Congress to renew FISA Section 702, which allows our government to spy on us if the purpose is to gather “foreign information.”
The Last Dinner Party have been anointed a Next Big Thing by many critics. The BBC talked to the quintet about what that’s been like, including weird accusations that they were a fabricated band like a K-Pop act.
Board game news: There’s a new site devoted to video and board game content called Aftermath. It’s a writer-owned subscription site that hopes to follow the Defector model, and includes Luke Plunkett, who spent many years at Kotaku, and whom I met on the Shelf Stories podcast this summer.
The Kickstarter for Undergrove, the newest game from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave (co-designed with Mark Wootton), is already over $250K in just three days.
Alley Cat Games has a Kickstarter for a fresh printing of the 2017 game Calimala, designed by Fabio Lopiano (3 Ring Circus, Merv).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, environment, florida, links, longreads, louisiana, maine, Music, new york, stick to baseball, vaccines, water crisis

→ August 26, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/26/23.

Three new pieces this week for subscribers to the Athletic: Some thoughts on Shohei Ohtani’s free agency in the wake of his torn UCL; a post mortem after the White Sox fired Kenny Williams and Rick Hahn; and why college conference realignment is probably bad for college baseball.

At Paste, I reviewed the board game Hickory Dickory, which has a very cute theme and some clever mechanics but I think might just be overdesigned in the end. I do like it, just with reservations.

On the Keith Law Show, I spoke with Joe Posnanski about his upcoming book Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments, which comes out on September 5^th. You can listen & subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Quillette has a lengthy explanation of the failed lab-leak hypothesis around COVID-19’s origins, and the people who still refuse to accept its failure.
Vanity Fair gives the previously untold story of a Texas mom who was abducted by a serial killer in 1981 and talked him into letting her go by leaning on her deep religious faith.
Writing in the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow has an unflattering profile of Elon Musk and the billionaire’s increasing influence over public policy.
ProPublica provides the coda to their coverage of Illinois student Amara Harris, who was given a ticket by police when she was accused of stealing a fellow student’s AirPods. She won her case when a jury in Naperville determined that she did not knowingly take the AirPods (she thought they were hers and returned them when approached), and the story highlights the use of police in schools for incidents that could be handled first by school officials.
The man who shot a California store owner for flying a Pride flag was a far-right conspiracy theorist who followed the religious zealot Matt Walsh and espoused false-flag hoaxes and climate change denial.
Oppenheimer left out a key part of the history of nuclear weapons: the exploitation of Congolese people who mined the uranium ore by hand, including a massacre of workers who tried to bargain for higher wages in 1941.
This 2022 article from Vice explains productivity cafes, a Japanese trend of coffee shops and bars where you tell the employees the task you’re trying to finish when you enter and they won’t let you leave until you’ve finished (e.g., writing a chapter).
FIFA just temporarily suspended Luis Rubiales, the President of the Spanish football federation, after he kissed Spanish player Jenni Hermoso on the lips without her consent and subsequently claimed that she did consent in the wake of calls for him to resign.
A Maine hospital is threatening to sue a 15-year-old college student for defamation over his petition calling for increased patient safety at their facility. FIRE has stepped in to demand that Northern Light retract the threat, citing Maine’s anti-SLAPP law.
Guitar legend Carlos Santana went on a bizarre anti-trans rant during a recent concert in Atlantic City.
A goal that seemed impossible just a few years ago is in sight – we might be able to eradicate wild polio in the wild, which would make it just the third disease we’ve eradicated after smallpox and rinderpest.
Delaware has joined the growing list of states and cities prohibiting restaurants from using polystyrene containers, which don’t break down in landfills and can leach chemicals into the water supply.
The Baltimore Banner once again calls out Orioles owner/failson John Angelos for how his antics are overshadowing the team’s incredible season. We’re now over seven months past his promise to open the team’s books.
Tiny forests of native flora can help increase biodiversity and grab some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, growing even on spaces that might seem too small to support this kind of horticulture.
One version of a single gene may increase your chances of developing long COVID after infection.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, biodiversity, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, first amendment, illinois, links, longreads, maine, metoo, soccer, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 27, 2021
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/26/21.

I had one filler post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week to tide us over until we get to my predictions this upcoming week, looking at some possible trends in player development to watch for as games begin next week. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

At Paste, I reviewed Renature, the latest collaborative design from Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling, who’ve worked together before on Torres and Tikal. This game has a good bit more oomph to it – it’s less abstract and definitely more fun.

On the Keith Law Show this week I spoke to Julie DiCaro about her new book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America and how sports leagues can do better on matters of gender, race, harassment, and domestic violence. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Amazon, and Spotify.

For more of me, you can subscribe to my free email newsletter. Also, you can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out on April 6^th, just 10 days from now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A professor in the United Kingdom who has spent about a decade trying to defend the Assad regime in the western media thought he was corresponding with a Russian spy, but was actually talking to someone at the very group he was trying to discredit. Prof. Paul McKeigue is also a COVID-19 hoaxer, signatory to the Great Barrington anti-lockdown manifesto, and close pal of a 9/11 hoaxer.
ProPublica looks at the disastrous state of Maine’s public defense system; the state has no public defenders and farms the work out to private attorneys, many of whom are ineligible to try the cases they’re assigned.
Just twelve people are responsible for two-thirds of the anti-vaccine content found on social media. The Center for Countering Digital Hate has issued a report on the dirty dozen and is urging social media platforms to crack down before it’s too late. Just days before they released, a dozen state attorney generals told Facebook and Twitter to do a better job against this misinformation. I’m pleased to see our Attorney General here in Delaware, Kathy Jennings, was one of the signatories.
It’s been lost in the news for understandable reasons, but Aurora, Colorado, police forced an innocent Black family, including a six-year-old girl, to lie on the pavement while the cops had guns drawn – and they’re upset at the angry response to their actions.
Eric Garcia writes in the Washington Post of the rightward shift of some Latino men, including his father, an avid Trump supporter. It’s the most vulnerable demographic in the Democratic coalition right now.
Also in the Post, a principal in Indio, California, has had to go looking for students missing since the city’s high school closed to in-person instruction last March.
USA Today, the same newspaper that rushed to have Bob Nightengale provide a fresh coat of whitewash to Thom Brennaman after the latter uttered a vile homophobic slur on air, fired For the Win’s Hemal Jhaveri for tweeting about mass shooters mostly being white men.
The story of cascatelli, a new pasta shape designed by podcast host Dan Pashman, is an amazing only-in-2021 kind of tale where a guy who thinks (correctly) that spaghetti (the shape) is boring and nonfunctional can end up engineering a brand new shape and partnering with a manufacturer to produce it.
The great Dr. Peter Hotez debunks five myths about coronavirus vaccines in a piece he co-wrote with Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi in the Washington Post.
Zoom earned $660 million in pre-tax profits in 2020 and paid $0 in taxes on it. It might be cheaper to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely – saving the costs to collect it and freeing up productive capacity dedicated to it – than to perpetuate a system where this happens over and over.
North Carolina sends six-year-olds to court, as in the case of a boy who faced a hearing for picking a tulip from a neighbor’s yard.
Arkansas passed a law that would allow doctors to deny medical care to LGBTQ+ patients. The absolute obsession many Republicans have with gay and trans Americans is pathological.
West Virginia is trying to ban needle exchanges in the midst of the country’s worst HIV outbreak.
Here in Delaware, a former police officer who shot an unarmed teen and escaped criminal charges has been indicted for lying about the incident and tampering with evidence.
Illinois State Rep. LaShawn Ford resigned from the board of Loretto Hospital to protest the board’s decision not to suspend or fire the CEO and COO who distributed vaccines to ineligible recipients at Trump Tower and other wealthy enclaves.
A Missouri Republican state senator has been charged with fraudulently billing the government for over $900,000 in COVID-19 claims, including some services that were never provided.
Dr. Emily Oster caused a stir recently with a column that had a headline saying your unvaccinated kids were comparable to their vaccinated grandparents. Dr. Tara C. Smith explained why this is misleading and possibly dangerous, one of the critiques that led Dr. Oster to correct herself a day or two later.
Naia Cucukov, the Executive Producer of the acclaimed 2020 Netflix adaptation of The Babysitter’s Club, wrote a powerful thread in the wake of the shootings of Asians by a deranged white man in Atlanta last week. (Naia is also a personal friend.)
Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic and its various offshoots (as well as Era: Medieval Age), is working on a new game about combating climate change.
A 25-year-old mystery about the sudden deaths of bald eagles in some parts of the south has now been solved. Humans were responsible, of course, but perhaps not in a way you’d expect.
GQ interviews the priceless Sir Ian McKellen on his remarkable career, including an upcoming film shot entirely on iPhones in London’s mostly empty streets.
The New York Times’ Bret Stephens, known for so many things but especially (to me) for his climate change denialism, is the editor of a new journal focusing on “Jews and social justice.”
The BBC profiles Jang Yeong-Jin, the only openly gay North Korean defector. Jang crawled across the DMZ to reach South Korea in 1997, and now, at 62, is about to get married.
The New Republic argues that the media are manufacturing a crisis at the border to try to prove that they’re balanced in their coverage of President Biden.
Cymru am byth.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arkansas, coronavirus, links, longreads, maine, north carolina, racism, science, social media, vaccines, west virginia

→ June 1, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/1/19.

My second mock first round for Monday’s MLB draft went up this past Tuesday for ESPN+ subscribers; my Big Board, ranking the top 100 prospects in the class, went up the previous week. I held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will hold another Monday afternoon, plus a Periscope live chat Monday night after the draft starts.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Aerion, a fun little solo game from the designer of Onirim, but that might be a bit too easy to beat. I won every single time I played; it was often close, but I still could find a way to win even with various included expansions.

I finally got back to my email newsletter yesterday, talking about why this was such a weird draft class to cover.

And now, the links…

One of those viral videos that purported to depict racism against African-Americans, this one involving a Chipotle employee (herself a person of color), turned out to get the story backwards; CNN has a long piece breaking down how the ‘internet mob’ got the story wrong and how it affected the woman targeted by the online outrage.
The BBC relates the history of British colonial authorities trying to erase hijras, India’s “third gender.” India recognized transgender people as an official third gender in 2014.
Jonathan Mayo polled 22 MLB scouts and executives asking who they’d take #1 in this draft class.
Waldorf Schools in California form major clusters of unvaccinated children; parents of these kids interviewed in this Guardian article voice the appeal to nature fallacy or the false conflict of interest claims. As much as anti-science is associated today with fundamentalist religion, you can also find wide swaths of anti-vaccine sentiment on the left in communities like these.
A German father wrote about losing his son to SSPE, a rare but invariably fatal side effect of measles infections. Max caught measles at six months, too young to be vaccinated, and SSPE put him into a vegetative state at the age of 12, after he’d suffered seizures and lost most of his memories. He died at 20.
Maine became the fourth state to eliminate non-medical exemptions to mandatory childhood vaccination rules, with the law passing the state’s Senate by a single vote. State Sen. James Dill (D), who voted for the bill, still raised bogus arguments about genetic conditions that might exempt children from the schedule, despite a total lack of evidence to support the existence of any such conditions. He’s listed as a scientist in that article, but his specialty is pest management, not immunology.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham defended white supremacist Paul Nehlen as a “prominent voice” who was “censored” (not what that word means) by social media.
Elizabeth Warren’s explanation of why she won’t do a town hall on Fox News is perfect (although I have no idea what Whoopi Goldberg is talking about at the end).
Why is the Administration referring to fossil fuels as “molecules of freedom?”
A science professor at Williams College writes about how students are rejecting science that challenges their worldviews, such as discussions of genetic differences between males and females, or across different geographic groups.
This New York Post article asserting that some students are avoiding colleges in states that are trying to outlaw abortion seems incredibly anecdotal, even if it’s sort of plausible. I’d like to see actual data on whether this affects applications or enrollment at any such schools before we claim this is a thing.
The Good Men Project tracks Sean Doolittle’s tour of MLB cities’ independent bookstores.
I loved Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I enjoyed this mental floss piece with some facts and trivia about the novel.
A University of Alabama-Birmingham study of spectator injuries at sporting events pointed to the need for more netting to protect fans from “ballistic” injuries – something flying from the field of play into the seats.
There’s a new, micro-game on Kickstarter from Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrave called Tussie Mussie.
Tweet of the week:
The people who belittle @AOC for being a former waitress are the same faulting @ewarren for billing out at $675/hr. So how much exactly should world-changing women make?

— Katherine M. Gordon (@katgordon) May 28, 2019

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, baseball, india, lgbt rights, links, maine, vaccines, white nationalism

→ January 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/5/19.

Just one ESPN+ piece this week, due to holidays & my work on prospect rankings, this one looking at the Mariners’ signing of NPB star Yusei Kikuchi. I also held a Klawchat this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: There’s yet another grift on the amazon marketplace, for consultants claiming they can teach you how to get rich selling Chinese products without ever handling the goods yourself.
The Guardian retweeted a piece from last January, on why the dominant narrative about depression might be incomplete, in highlighting some their best longreads from the last year. It’s an excerpt from a longer book, and argues that simply giving medication to people with depression may miss the underlying causes.
The Washington Post looks at the rise of ‘deepfakes’ and their potential for extortion or revenge. Deepfakes are porn videos where the target’s face has been swapped for that of one of the performers in the clip.
Packers beat writer Ryan Wood shared the story of his wife’s mental illness, including multiple suicide attempts and, more recently, some hope due to treatment and medications that seem to be helping.
Antibiotic resistance is rising, but the Trump Administration is allowing growers to spray them on citrus plants to fight a disease called “citrus greening.”
The EPA is also trying to make it easier for coal plants to spit more mercury and more particulate matter into the atmosphere by changing how the agency measures costs and benefits. You can still weigh in on this proposal by emailing a-and-r-docket@epa.gov with Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2018-0794 in the subject line.
My friend Tim Grierson explains why we shouldn’t listen to Netflix’s claims of a huge audience for Bird Box. Tim’s year-end post on his personal blog, which includes his top ten movies of 2018, is also well worth your time, even though he’s clearly wrong about Shoplifters.
Outgoing Maine Governor Paul LePage, an outright racist who claimed 90% of drug dealers in Maine were people of color, pardoned a Republican buddy of his of a felony drug trafficking charge, which may in turn complicate an investigation into a firearms possession charge against the latter.
A healthy 39-year-old man got the flu last winter and ended up in a coma, so this year he’s getting his flu shot and encouraging others to do the same. It isn’t too late to get yours.
For subscribers to The Athletic, Cliff Corcoran asks what it takes for a new advanced metric to catch on. One factor that I would have mentioned had Cliff asked me was the reputation of the source – the genetic fallacy in practice, of course, but I believe it matters even though it shouldn’t.
The “likeable” bullshit line has resurfaced this week with Elizabeth Warren’s announcement that she intends to run for President in 2020; the Atlantic points out that the biggest reason for her perceived unpopularity is that she’s a woman. People, both men and women, view women who are in power or who seek power more harshly than we do men, and journalists need to point this out when discussing whether a politician is “electable.”
House Democrats wasted no time after their swearing-in ceremonies in introducing a bill to make it easier to register to vote and harder for states to gerrymander their Congressional districts. It also includes a “requirement that sitting presidents and vice presidents, along with candidates for those offices, release their tax returns from the past 10 years.” I wonder what that’s about.
George Will writes that Republicans should be concerned by ‘signs of intelligent life’ in the Democratic Party after Rep. Cheri Bustos won election as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Bloomberg looks at what opponents of Seattle’s $15 minumum wage law got wrong, as evidence mounts that the hike hasn’t hurt job growth or reduced hours for workers. The article says the early analyses of the law’s impact weren’t just wrong, but extremely wrong, because the people looking at the data did so through the bias of existing theory that the law would indeed have these deleterious effects.
Nicaragua has slipped back into autocracy since the Sandinista leader who ran the country in the 1980s, Daniel Ortega, returned to power in 2007, and this year he’s led a violent crackdown on dissidents. The family of one protestor, a 24-year-old Belgian-Nicaraguan named Amaya Coppens, has been pleading with the international community to pressure Ortega’s government to no avail. It’s as if despots see the void left by the United States’ departure from the international arena and now can act with impunity against their own people.
The same is certainly true of the Saudis, with Jamal Khashoggi of course, but also with other dissidents, including Loujain al-Hathloul, a leader of the Saudi women’s right-to-drive movement. The Saudis kidnapped her and her husband in Dubai, trafficked them back to Saudi Arabia, and jailed them both – even though women were granted the right to drive in June.
CartoonBrew surveyed some animation critics before the Oscar shortlists came out, and they argue that the Academy whiffed on the best shorts of 2018. I’ve seen five of the ten on the shortlist; four were good, including Bao, Weekends (available there for just a few more days), and Lost & Found.
WIRED argues that more people should be using Tor, software that protects your anonymity online by routing traffic through an overlay network of thousands of relays so that your location and history online aren’t visible to sniffers or other forms of surveillance.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: environment, links, maine, mental health, mental illness, seattle, stick to baseball

→ July 14, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/14/18.

No new Insider pieces this week; I’ll have a Futures Game wrapup Sunday night and an updated top 50 prospects ranking out on Thursday. I did hold a Klawchat this past week.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the popular and very highly-rated new board game Rising Sun, from designer Eric Lang (Blood Rage, Ancestree), a $100 game with meticulously-crafted miniature figures but a fairly straightforward set of mechanics around area control and negotiation.

In just a few hours, I’ll be DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose with Jay Jaffe to talk about our books and sign copies. The event starts at 6 pm.

Two weeks from today, I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, MA at 1 pm to speak and sign copies of my book as well.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian goes deep on how the Caribbean island of Nevis, half of the country of St. Kitts and Nevis, has become one of the world’s most secretive offshore havens for money laundering and tax evasion.
Was rum invented in India, not the Caribbean as generally believed? It sounds like it – but to what extent was rum invented rather than discovered? It’s the distilled byproduct of the fermentation of molasses, which itself was the waste left over from sugar production; millers left the molasses out in the sun, using it to feed slaves, and the stuff would ferment into the precursor of rum.
There are anti-vaxxers even in the world of horses, and the result is a fight against a vaccine for an equine virus called Hendra, a very deadly paramyxovirus that can also infect humans, and is among the candidates for the next global pandemic.
No sooner do I praise Italy for the quality of life over there than the new right-wing government says parents no longer have to provide proof of vaccinations for schoolchildren. Some useful phrases for Italian learners: il morbillo, la parotite, la rosolia = measles, mumps, rubella.
Increased use of nonmedical (i.e., bogus) exemptions has driven down vaccination rates in Arizona, spurring fears of loss of herd immunity for highly contagious, deadly diseases already present in the state like measles and pertussis.
The “white nose fungus” killing bats is spreading to more states and more bat species. Bats serve a crucial role in human agriculture, feeding on many pests that would otherwise destroy crops or encourage further use of pesticides.
There’s a lot more talk about plastic pollution lately, even in our destroy-the-EPA life as it is right now. Recycling alone won’t solve this problem; we need to make less, use less, and think more holistically about the life cycle of plastics. And as of this year, China won’t recycle the world’s plastic waste any more.
Deadspin ran this crushing letter from a parent whose preschool-aged daughter was molested by a relative. One key line, from the therapist the parent consulted: “Kids that age don’t make this kind of statement up, you have to take it seriously.” Bear that in mind when you read excuses made for a certain Oregon State left-hander who pled guilty to molesting a child around this age, and now has tried to deny it.
The U.S. economy is approaching the mythical threshold known as “full employment,” although such figures generally ignore unemployed workers who have chosen not to continue seeking work, or who are unable to for whatever reason. But full employment isn’t NAIRU, the non-accelerating rate of unemployment, so high inflation is eating most workers’ wage gains.
People often ask how I ended up choosing Delaware when I relocated from Arizona back to the east coast. One reason was its low taxes, and it turns out that Delaware’s tax burden is the lowest of all 50 states after you adjust for cost of living. I actually think our property taxes could be higher, especially if the funds could help improve the dismal schools in the city of Wilmington and boost its police force.
The San Francisco branch of the Federal Reserve posted a note saying the 2017 GOP Tax Bill will boost the economy far less than promised, in part because the economy was already growing over the previous few years.
Mainers keep voting for Medicaid expansion and their racist governor Paul LePage, a Republican, refuses to implement it. He’s offered to go to jail rather than expand the program, to which I say, why not both?
I reviewed the new documentary about Fred Rogers the other day; the Observer has a piece on the ‘haunting doubts’ of Rogers and Paddington Bear, building off a line Rogers uttered to his wife shortly before he died, wondering if he’d been a good enough Christian in his life.
Stop ‘snitch tagging’ on social media. I block anyone who does this. If someone asks me about a player, don’t tag the player on my response. People doing that have largely driven me away from tweeting opinions on players, and leaving those opinions in chats or on ESPN.
A Republican state senator in Kansas who is running in a primary for a Congressional seat said “outside of western civilization is only barbarism”, and later clarified that he meant Judeo-Christian civilization … you know, the same civilization that enslaved over 10 million Africans not very long ago.
Neutrinos are one of the great mysteries of particle physics – long believed to be massless, now known to have unfathomably minuscule mass, interacting via the weak force and gravity, able to pass through entire planets without hitting anything – and for the first time, scientists detected neutrinos and identified their source galaxy.
The Daily Beast has a fun slideshow of the strange mix of stunning architectural styles in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Tweet of the week:

It’s so fucking weird that we scrape the seed pod of an orchid into ice cream and that flavor is considered plain.

— Michael Hoffman (@Hoffm) July 6, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, caribbean, Economics, environment, italy, kansas, links, maine, physics, pollution, rum, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ June 30, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/30/18.

I’m back from a European vacation that took us to Dublin, southern France, Monaco (my daughter really wanted to see it), Genoa (to visit my cousins there), and Milan. I ate a lot of gelato, which is the most important part, isn’t it? Before I left I did file one Insider piece, the annual top 25 players under 25 list, and please read the intro because as usual many people didn’t.

Over at Paste, my review of Merlin, the really awful new game from Stefan Feld, also went up while I was gone. Feld has designed several games I love, including The Castles of Burgundy, so this point-salad mess was a huge disappointment.

Book signings! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in Washington DC, with my friend Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball and both of our books on July 14th at 6 pm, and will be at Paul Swydan’s new bookstore The Silver Unicorn in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th at 1 pm (waiting for the link but it is confirmed). I will also be at the Futures Game in DC on the 15th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian profiles art forgery detective James Martin, who now works for Sotheby’s and has advised museums and government agencies on dozens of cases of suspected counterfeit art pieces.
WIRED has a very long read on the scandal around the cryptocurrency Tezos, which appears to have attracted several scam artists, shockingly, to a real bit of technological promise. Most of these so-called currencies are Ponzi schemes; Bitcoin itself is down 70% since November after a brief bubble over the winter. And the SEC is now clamping down on them by (correctly) identifying them as securities bought and sold as investments.
Forbes examines the ongoing mystery of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s missing wealth, which appears to be tied up in companies that he’s charged with regulating, or companies caught up in various other scandals, including one that is now enmeshed in Robert Mueller’s investigation.
James Bridle’s medium post last year on algorithmically-generated Youtube videos that were totally inappropriate for the children they targeted went viral and led to promised changes in Youtube’s policies, but he writes now for the Guardian that things haven’t really changed much at all.
Rebecca Traister’s much-shared Summer of Rage editorial covers a ton of ground in a brief space, but the main takeaway is that we are still governed by a small minority of white, Christian men, who seem increasingly uncomfortable when anyone from outside their circle of members and sycophants tries to share in their power.
George Will wrote an op ed urging voters to vote against the Republican Party this November. Will is one of the very few leading conservative voices to take a pragmatic hard line against the current GOP.
Russian buyers have been buying Trump properties, often at inflated prices via shell companies, which at least appears to be a mechanism for money laundering.
The New York Times‘ opinion page had a massive editorial breakdown last week, as it ran a very good editorial decrying this bullshit ‘civility’ debate. I can only assume the page’s editor, James Bennet, was out sick that day.
California put noted anti-vaccine crank Dr. Bob Sears on probation, rather than revoking his license outright, for writing a bogus letter exempting a toddler from all mandatory vaccinations. Of course, he’s denying wrongdoing even though he settled the case, and says he’ll continue to fight public health laws that require vaccinations for schoolchildren.
Anti-vaxxers love to claim that Dr. Diane Harper has claimed that the HPV vaccine is harmful, but she made it very clear in a statement earlier in June that the vaccine is safe and she supports its use across the population to help lower the rates of cervical and other HPV-related cancers.
A new study from Massachusetts General Hospital found that an old tuberculosis vaccine may permanently lower blood sugar levels in diabetics, although the effect can take a few years to kick in.
Dr. Vinay Prasad, an oncologist active on social media, has provoked the ire of cancer researchers by calling out the bogus hype around ‘precision’ treatments that claim to use the patient’s genes to create more targeted anti-cancer medications. The data, he argues, do not show anywhere near the benefit that precision treatment’s proponents promise.
The FDA just approved its first marijuana-derived prescription drug, which uses cannabidiol (CBD) to reduce seizures in two severe forms of epilepsy. The DEA still has to remove CBD from its list of Schedule I drugs before the medication can hit the market.
Unfortunately, the FDA is also rubber-stamping approval of many drugs of dubious safety and/or efficacy as it caters to the pharmaceutical firms that fund it.
BuzzFeed looks at the unlikely comeback of Twitter, which I was told even by people within ESPN was a dying medium and not worth the time writers were spending on it.
The Royals floated a trial balloon around their plans to sign convicted child molester Luke Heimlich, and it went over about as well as you’d expect. The Kansas City Star‘s Vahe Gregorian wrote a great piece on why they shouldn’t do it. Here’s my take in two sentences: If you believe Heimlich deserves a “second chance,” then you have to explain why you’re giving him one even though he’s denying he ever committed the crimes to which he confessed. If you believe that he’s telling the truth now and didn’t commit those acts, then you have to explain why you think a 6-year-old girl fabricated these stories about her abuse and why you’re taking the word of someone with everything to gain over the word of a child victim.
Q-Tip once again teased the solo album he’s been promising for five years in a tweet two weeks ago.
No, Mr. President, crime in Germany is not way up, it’s way down, at its lowest level in decades.
The Representative from my hometown of Smithtown, New York, held a campaign rally featuring Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka this week.
Maine Senator Susan Collins has somehow acquired the label of a “moderate” Republican, but wrote a letter to constituents defending Trump’s policy of separating immigrant families. Her term is up in 2020.
Walgreens faced a backlash last week when an Arizona pharmacist refused to do his job when a woman came in with a prescription for a drug to terminate her non-viable pregnancy. Walgreens claimed the employee acted “within company guidelines.”
A family of Syrian refugees whose Damascus chocolate factory was destroyed in the civil war have restarted their business in Nova Scotia (article in French). Their products include a limited edition line of pride-themed packaged chocolate bars. As our President and his myrmidons continue to attack immigrants as criminals and leeches, it’s worth remembering that many refugees had lives and careers that were destroyed by war – they were doctors or lawyers or craftspersons and want little more than a safe place to live and work.
Tweet of the week:

1) No they don’t.
2) No they don’t.
3) Yes they can.
4) No, they reduce SIDS by 50%.
5) No they don’t.
6) No they fucking don’t.
7) No they don’t except for fleetingly rare anaphylaxis.
8) No they don’t.
9) No they don’t.

Vaccines cause adults. pic.twitter.com/pcAeClyuYW

— Doc Bastard (@DocBastard) June 19, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: art, baseball, chocolate, cryptocurrencies, links, maine, new york, rap, stick to baseball, the swamp, twitter, vaccines

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