pseudoscience — Page 3

→ February 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/10/18.

My one new piece for Insiders this week covers the Cubs signing Yu Darvish to a six-year deal. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the new, light strategy board game Majesty: For the Realm for Paste this week.

I’ve been sending out my free email newsletter a bit more regularly now that the prospect work is over. Also, Smart Baseball will be out in paperback on March 13th; you can pre-order it on amazon or elsewhere, although at the moment the hardcover version is about $1 cheaper.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This New Orleans Times-Picayune story on a photographer’s friendship with former NFL player Jackie Wallace, who has intermittently gone missing due to his ongoing substance abuse problems, is beautifully written and devastating at the same time.
This 20,000-word piece profiling the Resnicks, the biggest farmers in the United States, manages to touch on water shortages & fights, how companies treat their employees, and the marketing of food in a wide-ranging and brilliant article that doesn’t directly take sides.
A Georgia con artist failed to fulfill a FEMA contract to deliver hot meals to Puerto Rico and is now suing the agency for $70 million. Tiffany Brown had no disaster relief experience, but got the contract anyway, even though you can see on Yelp that she’s been accused of small-scale fraud.
The New Yorker looks at SHIFT, a massive, ongoing research project on sexual behavior on campus located at and funded by Columbia. The goal is to find small, structural changes they can make to student life to reduce the incidence of unwanted sexual contact.
Michael Lewis looks at the Trump Presidency from inside and without, including spending time with a thoroughly unchastened Steve Bannon, in a long piece for Bloomberg News.
Can technology help reduce the sugar in gelato and other desserts? More importantly, why would we want to?
The Asheville Citizen-Times reports on the huge rise in children entering foster care because their parents are hooked on opioids, a problem particularly affecting western North Carolina and other parts of the Appalachian Highlands. The issues range from infants born with up to eight different drugs in their systems to older children dealing with untreated or undertreated post-traumatic stress disorder.
Climate change may release tons of mercury into the atmosphere, well beyond previous projections, because permafrost soil – which may not be so “perma” after all – contains more of the metal than earlier estimates held.
A record number of scientists are running for office this year, spurred by the federal government’s unconscionable, irrational lurch towards denialist policies on everything from climate change to clean water.
Geothermal energy is gaining increased attention as a renewable energy source, which means the current Administration will likely target it with tax hikes and tell us more about “clean, beautiful coal.”
A Pennsylvania Republican is trying to impeach state Supreme Court justices who struck down the state’s gerrymandered map for Congressional seats. Cris Dush, who represents a rural part of western PA, says it’s not about their ruling, but their process. The state’s Democrat governor discussed the gerrymandering ruling with the Washington Post.
Pennsylvania is no isolated case; the Republican Party is benefiting from a long-range, planned effort to gerrymander states across the country to try to hold power in Congress even though they consistently lose the popular vote.
Want to hear a Polish joke? The country passed a law making it illegal to say Polish people collaborated with the Nazis, part of a rising tide of anti-Semitism across Eastern Europe. The country’s president signed the law, drawing a rebuke from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
An Alabama high school teacher compared Obama to Hitler and assigned an overwhelmingly conservative summer reading list, including Liberalism is a Mental Disorder.
Over 100,000 people protested in Athens … because they don’t like the name of the country Macedonia. I suppose in a country with a 21% unemployment rate, it’s not like these people have anything better to do.
Paul Ryan’s office tweeted about a woman thanking him for a tax cut that gave her an $1.50 a week … and then deleted it in the face of widespread criticism and mockery. The tax cut gave a disproportionate benefit to higher-income earners, even though it’s far from clear that this will do anything to stimulate the economy; there’s a competing school of thought that savings and/or consumption do more to drive growth.
Slate ran a junk-science article claiming backpackers don’t need to filter or treat stream water before drinking it; Discover had one of the best rebuttals of this nonsense, although it still wasn’t enough to convince Slate to correct or take down its post and the dangerous advice therein.
A publicly-funded college in Ontario is launching a diploma program in the pseudoscience homeopathy.
My current home state of Delaware reported its fourth flu death of the season last week, as new flu cases for the last full week of January were double those of the same week last year.
A Colorado man whose rape conviction was overturned after he spent 28 years in prison is suing the state … and the state’s Attorney General is fighting his $1.9 million request.
A new Kickstarter for the board game CO2: Second Chance, an update and reissue of a climate-change themed game from 2012, blew past its funding goal in the first few days last week.
Asmodee’s acquisition binge continued this week with the announcement that they’re acquiring Mayfair Games and Lookout Games. Mayfair, which announced it was shutting its doors after 36 years in business, was the longtime publisher of Catan, while Lookout published Uwe Rosenberg’s biggest titles, including Agricola and Patchwork.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, delaware, links, longreads, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball

→ February 3, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/3/18.

My org reports and top ten prospect lists for all 30 teams are now up for Insiders, which concludes this year’s prospect rankings package:

• NL East
• NL Central
• NL West
• AL East
• AL Central
• AL West

I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday.
I’ve been selling some of my board game collection and donating the proceeds to charity, including the Food Bank of Delaware and hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

With the prospects project done, I resumed my free email newsletter this past week. Also, the paperback edition of Smart Baseball comes out on March 13th; you can buy any of the editions through HarperCollins’ site.

And now, the links…

Damon Krukowski, formerly of the band Galaxie 500, has a long (and somewhat rambling) piece on the state of the music industry in the age of streaming, and how only the most popular artists are well served by the emerging model.
Undark looks at the debate over the debate over cell phone radiation safety, much of which hinges on the understanding of terms like “evidence” or “proof.”
Climate change is threatening coffee farms around the world; genetic engineering may be our best weapon to fight it, even though it’s a popular bogeyman of the anti-science crowd across the spectrum.
This piece was everywhere last weekend, but in case anyone missed it, the New York Times piece on the fake Twitter follower industry, in which they outed many heavy Twitter users who have bought followers – including former ESPN employee Britt McHenry, 90% of whose followers are ‘fake.’ (I have never bought any followers on any social media network, but I do have followers that independent sites tag as ‘fake.’)
Hackers from the Dutch intelligence service are a major reason we know about Russian interference in our elections.
The Sydney Morning Herald published an extract from an upcoming book about a tattooist at Auschwitz, a Slovakian Jew who becomes the camp’s Tätowierer to survive.
Stephanie Springer looks at pseudoscientific therapies on the rise in baseball, including “cupping,” which Bryce Harper has adopted.
The CEO of Oxfam America writes we must pass a real disaster relief package for Puerto Rico, and now. I can’t help wondering if Congress would move faster if Puerto Ricans 1) had actual votes in Congress 2) spoke English as their first or only language or 3) were white.
I’m a devoted Penzey’s customer because I think their spices and herbs are some of the best around, but it doesn’t hurt that they’ve taken a clear stand against bigotry and intolerance at a time when most companies avoid taking any kind of political stance.
NYC chef Elise Kornack writes about enforcing decency to make restaurants a better place for everyone.
Florida Representative Matt Gaetz brought a right-wing troll and Holocaust denier to the SOTU, and still brought him after he was informed of the man’s views.
The city of Philadelphia now has a daytime service center for the city’s homeless, including medical services for people with opioid addictions.
BBC Travel has a delightful photo/video essay on Monowi, Nebraska, population 1, the only incorporated municipality in the U.S. with just one resident.
The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank writes that Republicans have vacated their definitions of morality, accepting whatever Trump does and moving the line to condone it.
Paul Rosenzweig writes in the The Atlantic that dreams of Mueller indicting Trump are a fantasy, as it won’t be Mueller’s call to make.
There’s an unfortunate truth in this sarcastic rant: If Larry Nassar had been selling unauthorized T-shirts, Michigan State would have shut him down right away.
Farhad Manjoo argues in the NY Times that the online advertising model is the real problem with the modern Internet.
The Republican National Committee voted to define being transgender as “a disqualifying psychological and physical” condition, even though the American Psychological Association is clear that being transgender is not a mental disorder.
South Dakota Republicans have approved a bill out of a Senate committee to allow concealed carry without a permit.
Julian Assange is so desperate to help the GOP that he offered dope on Senator Mark Warner to a fake Sean Hannity Twitter account.
Also from Undark: Zooey Deschanel’s new web series peddles pseudoscience, even discouraging people who can’t afford organic produce – which is no more healthful for consumers than conventional – from buying certain fruits and vegetables at all.
Acram Digital, developers of the app versions of Eight Minute Empire and Martin Wallace’s Steam, announced that their next board game app will be the outstanding medium-weight strategy game Istanbul.
Eggerspiele announced their next release, Coimbra, a dice-drafting, heavy strategy game. (The link is in German but you can switch to English by clicking the flag in the upper right.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, links, organic agriculture, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

→ January 20, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/19/18.

I only wrote three things this week that you can see anywhere right now: Two posts for Insiders on the Andrew McCutchen trade and the Gerrit Cole trade; and a review of the movie Call Me By Your Name.

Everything else I wrote will go up next week as part of the top 100 prospects package. The top 100 itself is scheduled to run on Monday and Tuesday – I’m still working on the order – followed by the “just missed” column on Thursday and one page ranking all 30 farm systems on Friday, which means that last writeup will be more concise than last year’s. The org reports will run the week after. If you’re curious, I haven’t written anything besides the top 100 capsules yet. So, yeah, things are just great.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Guardian looks at a Youtube host who fought back against revenge porn posted by her ex and eventually won.
The Detroit News has a lengthy investigation into Michigan State’s role in covering up Larry Nassar’s serial abuse. It is quite clear that MSU President Lou Anna Simon needs to step down. ThinkProgress has a shorter piece identifying his enablers, many of whom are still in the jobs where they protected a known child molester.
ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ESPN the Magazine also published a detailed report on the many institutional failures that allowed Nassar to prey on teenaged and preteen girls for decades.
Aly Raisman gave a victim impact statement on Friday and she took no prisoners.
WIRED looks at the search for new antibiotics in a drug-resistant age, combining old searches in the soil with new techniques from metagenomics.
Also from the Guardian: A profile of Social Chain, a British “meme factory” that advises firms on creating content that will spread across social networks.
Business Insider goes into depth on Yale’s failures to handle sexual misconduct cases, with an assist in incompetence from the New Haven Police Department.
Tom Nichols writes for the Washington Post that the Trump presidency is damaging our entire democracy, including aiding extremists on the left who wish to control the Democratic party.
A Boston Globe investigation argues that the Maine Republican Party is behind anonymous attacks on opposing candidates, pushing fake and misleading stories that cost at least one candidate a likely electoral victory.
Some alt-right trolls clipped a talk given by psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker to make it appear that he was praising the people in that cesspool, and the edited video quickly spread through social media, a new example of the harm that such networks can do to our collective intelligence.
A new rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services would allow doctors to refuse to treat transgender patients and to otherwise hide behind claims of religion.
A supposedly “independent” watchdog group in Chicago called Project Six is actually bankrolled by the far right according to a joint investigation by ProPublica and the Chicago Sun-Times.
The accusation against Aziz Ansari has spurred lots of thinkpieces, many of them terrible. I thought Vox’s piece gave a balanced, nuanced take on the story, which doesn’t fit neatly into the “sexual assault” or “harassment” buckets we’ve been filling to surfeit of late.
Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, asks in an essay on the #MeToo movement, “Am I a Bad Feminist?“
Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible, argues in the other direction that women need to ‘get ugly’ and voice their anger, asserting their rights and continuing to force these uncomfortable conversations about how men treat women in our society.
NPR looks at Italy’s disappointing response to the #MeToo movement, as the largely Catholic country still adheres to the idea that victims must have deserved or provoked their assaults.
Somaliland, a self-declared independent country in the northern part of what the international community still recognizes as Somalia, passed a law outlawing rape and banning rapists from marrying their victims as a way to escape punishment, while also giving life sentences to rapists who give their victims HIV.
The NCAA answers to nobody, so this story shouldn’t surprise anyone: A college basketball player player who was expelled from Findlay College after a false rape accusation was denied a waiver to play for Duquesne because the NCAA rules by divine right.
Billboard looks at the legal questions behind Radiohead’s copyright infringement claims against Lana del Rey.
The Four Barrel Coffee saga continues to twist, as the owners announced a name change and plans to become an employee-owned company, then a decision to keep the Four Barrel name, and a settlement to the harassment lawsuit that brought the company’s unacceptable environment to the light.
A Tempe “naturopath” (a practitioner of pseudoscience) is suing a blogger who called out her bogus claims about healing cancer, which include injecting cancer patients with vitamin C and baking soda, telling them to go sugar-free, and other stuff that won’t work … while also telling them not to undergo chemo or radiation therapy. The lawsuit is clearly a SLAPP attempt, and you can donate to the blogger’s defense fund set up by the Australian Skeptics. Noted debunker Orac calls the naturopath’s suit “legal thuggery.”
Greater than Games is running a series of raffles and promotions for their Multiverse Month. The publisher’s main titles include Bottom of the 9th, Sentinels of the Multiverse, and Spirit Island.
I can’t figure out if food writer Tamara Adler’s diary is real or satire, because if it’s real, it’s the most pretentious thing I’ve read in years.
At the Gates, one of the founding acts of the Gothenburg school of melodic death metal, announced its new album will be released in May. To Drink from the Night Itself will be the band’s first record without founding guitarist Anders Björler.
And finally, a video I rather enjoyed from Twitter:

?#PositiveNewsWeekend

I love these Strandbeests: wind-propelled kinetic sculptures created by Dutchman Theo Jansen. #art #beach #animals #fun pic.twitter.com/0fIsmpVnQx

— Alexander Verbeek ? (@Alex_Verbeek) January 13, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, links, metoo, Music, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

→ January 6, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/6/18.

I’ve had no new content off the dish this week, as baseball is boring, and I’m working on my top 100 prospects package, which will run later this month. I will have a new board game review up on Paste next week, however.

Feel free to sign up for my email newsletter, which costs you nothing and totters somewhere between occasional and infrequent. And, of course, thanks to everyone who bought Smart Baseball for themselves or as a Christmas gift, or as a Christmas gift for themselves.

And now, the links…

Longreads: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, whose book The Food Lab I’ve recommended a few times around here, will open his first restaurant, Wursthall, in the next few weeks, and expectations are very high.
BBC News tells the story of a woman whose father, a Catholic priest, doesn’t even want to know her.
The Guardian looks at why paper hasn’t disappeared in a digital world.
In local news, the Delaware River Valley Commission has proposed a permanent ban on fracking in the region, but would still allow the dumping of fracking wastewater in the river basin.
The UK is experiencing a measles epidemic because of anti-vaxxer scaremongering. The MMR vaccine does not cause autism; it is both safe and very effective.
Meanwhile, in California, there’s a network of doctors willing to issue bogus medical exemptions to the state’s vaccination laws. The group is led by Bob Sears, who has profited handsomely from selling the lie that vaccines are harmful, including pushing an “alternative” vaccine schedule (with no benefit, just increased risk of exposure), and is facing a licensing hearing over one such exemption he issued. The state’s board of licensing needs to clamp down on these doctors abusing their privileges.
Computer science pioneer Barbara Simons wants an end to electronic voting because she believes such machines can’t be as secure as paper ballots. I guess she hasn’t seen Election.
Ad targeters are now pulling data from your browser’s password manager – all the more reason to not use that feature.
Women constitute nearly half of Iceland’s Parliament, so it’s no surprise that they passed a law making it illegal to pay women less than men.
Science-Based Medicine offers the top ten signs your ‘detox’ program might be a scam. There’s only one real detox or ‘cleanse’ program that works, and it’s happening in your liver already.
The EPA has hired a guy banned for life from the banking industry to oversee the Superfund program. As much damage as we’re seeing to our country’s institutions across the board right now, it pales compared to the massive rollbacks in environmental protections, which will take years and probably cost billions to clean up if and when we get the chance to do so. Yet another example: A tax on crude oil that generated $500 million per year to fund oil-spill cleanup efforts expired last week, a huge windfall for oil producers.
“Swatting,” the practice of phoning police with prank calls that lead authorities to send a SWAT team to someone else’s house, turned deadly last week with a man in Kansas getting shot by police after someone in LA made just such a bogus phone call. The suspect had a history of calling in false threats.
Coffee stuff: Is pour-over dead? Probably not, but I do expect to see more third-wave shops offer faster drip-coffee options for folks who don’t want to wait the 5+ minutes for hand-poured.
Four Barrel Coffee has long been among my favorite third-wave roasters in the country. Four former employees have said Four Barrel co-founder Jeremy Tooker sexually assaulted or harassed them.
Coachella’s owner, Philip Anschutz, gave nearly $200K to anti-LGBT and anti-abortion candidates in 2017, which seems at odds with the political stances of many of the artists who play the event.
National Review‘s Kyle Smith wrote that the publication’s support of stop and frisk was wrong. There’s still a bizarre swipe at New York Mayor Bill De Blasio for merely appearing in the same parade as a paroled Puerto Rican terrorist.
I enjoyed this Filipino teenager’s video explaining relativity in simple terms, which won her $400,000 in the annual Breakthrough Junior Challenge.
FiveThirtyEight gets it right by calling Tom Brady out on his pseudoscience bullshit.
People are getting very sick from taking rattlesnake pills. Today I learned that there is such a thing as rattlesnake pills, which are indeed made from ground-up rattlesnakes.
David French of the National Review wrote last week about how concerns over Trump’s mental state aren’t just about ‘tone’ or ‘style,’, which seems prescient in light of the President’s tweets Saturday morning.
In the wake of the release of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s instant best-seller about the first year of this Administration and the chaos within, James Fallows writes for The Atlantic that none of this is news to anyone in Washington.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, environment, links, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 26, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/26/17.

The big piece from me this week was about GenCon, the massive annual boardgaming convention held in Indianapolis; I went from Thursday to Sunday and my wrapup post covers every game I saw or tried, with a ranking of my top 20. I even slipped in a mention of some upcoming boardgame apps of note.

My latest piece for Insiders was a minor league scouting notebook covering prospects from Pittsburgh (Mitch Keller), Baltimore (Austin Hays), Philadelphia, and Colorado’s systems. I also did my annual rankings of the top tools in the majors: the top hit, run, and power tools, the best pitches of each type, and the
top gloves and arms for catchers, infielders, and outfielders. I don’t particularly love writing these pieces, but readers seem to enjoy them. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I gave a Talk at Google last month, discussing my book Smart Baseball, which you should definitely buy if you haven’t already.

And now, the links…

My friend Will Leitch speaks sense when he says the ESPN/Robert Lee flap was “much ado about nothing.”
Sam Miller described a trick play in a Rhode Island high school baseball game called skunk in the outfield. The play took 2:32 to complete and includes former Red Sox prospect Ryan Westmoreland.
Texas’ Republican Party believes so much in suppressing the vote that they’ve been wasting taxpayer money for six years fighting the courts and repeatedly losing. If the current Administration gets to pick some more federal judges, however, such efforts may end up succeeding.
The Interior Department has killed a study into the effects of coal mining on the miners. Trump’s Administration is obsessed with coal, which is dirty, exhaustible, and not a part of our energy future.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience site GOOP has been hit with formal complaints of deceptive advertising, mostly because they claim their bullshit actually works.
Stephan Neidenbach, a middle school teacher in Maryland and operator of the @welovegv (GMOs and Vaccines) twitter account, has used FOIA requests to find conflicts of interest and malfeasance from anti-GMO academics. Genetically modified organisms are safe, and academics who attack them do so in contravention of the evidence on the topic to date.
“Poland Spring … coming to you straight from the water main.” A lawsuit says it’s just tap water, not spring water as the company claims.
Former Google engineer James Damore claims he was “fired for telling the truth,” but the truth is that his now infamous memo was based on some seriously flawed beliefs about science.
Jess Luther exposes the deep ignorance of deposed University of Minnesota football coach Tracy Claeys, who still doesn’t think he or his players did anything wrong.
The Washington Post looks at what actual anti-fascist protestors, dubbed “antifa,” do and believe. You’ll hear the alt-right/neo-Nazi camp use “antifa” to try to draw some false equivalence between racist shitheads and those who oppose them. Don’t fall for it.
A British prisoner is now in year 11 of what was supposed to be a 10-month jail term under the bogus claim that it’s for his own protection, as he has a history of self-harm. Family members are trying to get him released before he kills himself in custody.
VICE’s Tonic has a first-person account from someone who got a staph infection from a hospital visit.
The civil war in Yemen has been going on for 29 months, but is rarely in our news because there’s little oil there. A Saudi-led airstrike in the capital of Sana’a killed at least 14 civilians, including children, but nobody seems to care.
Angola, another country you never think about – John Oliver would do a map joke here – just elected its first new leader in 38 yeras. It’s expected to be someone from the outgoing dictator’s party, and the elections have been anything but free. Still, it’s their first change in leadership since 1979, and given their atrocious economy and widespread poverty, any change has to seem like a chance for optimism.
TIME looks at how youth sports became a $15 billion industry. If your kid has talent, s/he doesn’t need to go pay to play at events for scouts or coaches. Save the cash and put it in a tax-deferred account for his/her tuition instead.
I’ll end with one feel-good story: The cloakroom girl at a British opera house had to step in when the soprano fell ill – and wowed the audience.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, gender issues, gmo, links, middle east, pseudoscience, Sports, stick to baseball, voter suppression

→ August 12, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/12/17.

I’m back from a week of vacation in Aruba, which was lovely, not least because I turned my phone off when we took off from BWI and didn’t turn it back on until we landed on US soil seven-plus days later. That means my last Insider posts were at the trade deadline, including breakdowns of the Yu Darvish trade, the Sonny Gray trade, and the Justin Wilson/Jeimer Candelario trade.

I’m back at Paste with a new boardgame review, this time of the two-player variant of Uwe Rosenberg’s massive Caverna, Caverna: Cave vs. Cave.

I appeared on the Ringer’s Achievement Oriented podcast, co-hosted by Ben Lindbergh, to discuss the current golden age of boardgames and how that might be affecting videogame funding. I also spoke with Jeff Krushell, who worked for the Blue Jays for some of the same years I did, about my book, Smart Baseball, and the role of analytics in the sport.

While I was away, the Washington Post ran a favorable review of Smart Baseball.

I’ll be at GenCon 50 in Indianapolis starting on Thursday, appearing on a few panels, signing copies of Smart Baseball on Friday at 2 pm (or if you see me walking around), and trying lots of new boardgames. I hope to see a bunch of you there.

And now, the links…

From Paste comes the ultimate breakdown of that insane SF Craigslist job posting. It has to be seen to be believed – and, for the record, I think the posting was serious and the authors possibly the least self-aware people outside of show business.
I mentioned the drop in videogame funding – specifically via Kickstarter – which Ben & co-host Jason pointed out to me via this link.
The headline for this piece, calling two-factor authentication “a mess,” is a bit overblown, but it’s true that 2FA isn’t the panacea it was promised to be. I use a hardware token for 2FA for some critical accounts.
The vaccine-denier lunatics traveling the US in a bus to show their bullshit movie Vaxxed tried to take their show to Australia, but the Aussies denied them entry and banned two of them from reentering Australia for three years. Australia is looking more and more like the sensible United States every day.
Trump’s anti-science proclamations have further energized the anti-vaccine movement, making it even more critical that those of us who support science – rational people, that is – are just as vocal about vaccines’ safety and efficacy.
There’s a bill likely to pass the House of Representatives with something like bipartisan support that uses the fight against sex trafficking as a cover for stripping liability protections for content providers. Imagine if Facebook was liable for copyright infringement every time a user posted a photo on the site without the copyright owner’s permission.
“Those with access to large amounts of money and raw power have been able to subvert all reason and fact in collective decision making.” Al Gore has a new documentary out and spoke to the Guardian about the pernicious influence of money on Western democracies.
Splinter looks at how that money has led the religious right to deny climate change.
It would be just fine with me if science-denier Jill Stein would just go away already.
Saudi Arabia, a so-called ally of the United States, has one of the most repressive regimes in the world when it comes to women’s rights (they have almost none), which is leading Saudi victims of domestic abuse to flee the country entirely.
“Clean” eating is codswallop, but it sells. The Guardian dives deep on why so many people swallowed this snake oil.
And speaking of snake oil, why don’t journalists question studies funded by advocacy groups the same way they question studies funded by industry?
Orphan Black is about to conclude its fifth and final season, which I’ve saved up on the DVR to binge after the minor league season ends. The show’s success has come in part due to its willingness to engage directly with fans online, including incorporating fan suggestions as details in actual episodes. It’s not a coincidence that I’ve been able to write about the show a few times, since I’ve been a vocal fan as well, ranking the clones for BBC America
and discussing the show’s use of boardgames in its stories.
Boardgamers in greater Philly: there’s a big boardgame convention, like GenCon, coming to the city in November. PAX Unplugged is dedicated to all things tabletop, and I’ll be there with bells on, signing books somewhere and walking the floor. Tickets (badges) are now available if you’re interested.
GIF-master CJ Fogler wins the Tweet of the Week with this feline/boardgame pun.

@keithlaw @Adam_Jacobi pic.twitter.com/ZGILMdp05j

— CJ Fogler (@cjzero) August 7, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, boardgames, british television, climate change, food science, links, pseudoscience, stick to baseball

→ June 24, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/24/17.

I wrote two new pieces for Insiders this past week, one looking at teams that just drafted their new #1 prospects and a minor league scouting piece on Phillies, Cleveland, Red Sox, and Astros prospects. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Smart Baseball got a nice sales bump last week from Father’s Day and from George Will’s favorable review in the Wall Street Journal (subscriber link). Ty Duffy also mentions the book in passing in a smart piece on how analytics are changing the game on the field, possibly for the worse. Thank you to everyone who’s purchased it. I hope to see many of you at my upcoming signings/appearances:

* Toronto, The Sports Gallery, June 26th
* Miami, Books and Books, July 8th
* Harrisburg, Midtown Scholar, July 15th
* Berkeley, Books Inc., July 19th
* Chicago, Volumes, July 28th, 7:30 pm
* GenCon (Indianapolis), August 17th-20th

Still working on Brooklyn and Phoenix for later this summer/fall, and I believe I’ll be signing at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia in November. Bookstores interested in hosting should contact Danielle Bartlett at HarperCollins; we’re trying to accommodate everyone we can within my work schedule.

And now, the links…

Chiropractors are bullshit, according to this longread, and in my experience a ridiculously high percentage of them are anti-vaxxers too.
Speaking of vaccine deniers, enjoy this post on how one rabid denier can’t do basic math despite claiming the minuscule amount of formaldehyde in vaccines is harmful. (Your body produces formaldehyde every day.)
WIRED looks at the leading hypotheses on the causes of autism spectrum disorder. Note that vaccines aren’t among them.
Buzzfeed has a great longread on the British scientist likely assassinated by Russian agents, and the British government’s apparent complicity in covering it up. The victim, Dr. Matthew Puncher, had helped prove that a Russian dissident was himself killed, via polonium-120 poisoning, by the Russian state. That’s the same Russian government to which our current Administration is cozying up, by the way.
Missouri, fighting to overtake Texas in the race to the bottom, is considering a law that would allow employers to disciminate against women who’ve had abortions or used birth control.
The Guardian looks at a 19-year-old heroin addict turned dealer in West Virginia as part of its series on the U.S. opioid epidemic.
The tick whose bite makes people allergic to red meat – specifically to a carbohydrate in red meat called alpha-gal – is spreading to the northern half of the U.S.. Use an insect repellent that contains DEET and, if you’re camping or otherwise outdoors in an area likely to have ticks, treat your clothing with permethrin.
Last week brought the shocking (#notshocked) news that coconut oil isn’t a magical health food after all. How did it ever get that reputation in the first place? A couple of isolated studies on individual chemicals found in coconut oil fueled a lot of wacko theories and charlatans selling “alternative medicine” solutions. It can be pretty useful in baking, though.
David French of the National Review had my favorite argument on why the Philando Castile verdict was “a miscarriage of justice”. Many of these cases are about race; this is about a cop who killed an innocent man who followed the cop’s instructions and died anyway.
Vulture’s Kyle Buchanan tells the movie industry to stop blaming critics for their own bad blockbusters.
Everyone’s got an opinion on why amazon is buying Whole Foods; I liked this explanation from The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson, although I think the real answers are probably even more complex. If Amazon merely wanted to buy a brick and mortar network to reach consumers, was this the best or only option? And what happens to folks like me, who’ve chosen Whole Foods because of the quality of its merchandise and/or because it allows consumers more choices for (ostensibly) responsible spending?
One study on Seattle’s minimum wage hike found it didn’t hurt employment in the food services industry, one of the sectors that was, in theory, likely to be most affected by such a law.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, author of the cookbook The Food Lab, is joining partners in opening his first restaurant, a sausage and beer hall in San Mateo, CA.
A Rhode Island teacher got to meet the President after winning a state award, and in his photo op decided to be ‘visibly queer’ to make a statement. The reason I included it here: He asked the President if it was OK before the pic, and Trump said yes.
Those Carrier jobs Trump/Pence claimed they’d saved? The company automated the plant and is moving the jobs to Mexico.
The ransomware attack earlier this year may have distracted authorities from an even more serious attack using tools leaked from the NSA.
I’ve mentioned the NYC cocktail bar Coup before, and they just got a positive writeup in the New Yorker. All proceeds there go to nonprofits fighting or threatened by the current Administration; you get a token with every drink you buy, and you place it in a vase for the charity you want to support.
Former NFL player Ryan O’Callaghan planned to killed himself because he didn’t want admit he was gay, but members of the Chiefs medical staff noticed changes in his behavior and ended up leading him to choose to live and come out publicly. The conversation he had with then-Chiefs GM Scott Pioli is particularly touching.
The “Angry Chef” now has a book coming out detailing how “alternative” ideas like detoxing are mostly just bullshit. Speaking of which, NASA just called bullshit on Gwyneth Paltrow’s fake-medicine site GOOP for claiming a product used the same material found in spacesuits. You are a complete idiot if you give her any of your money.
A Wisconsin ironworker is going to challenge Rep. Paul Ryan for the House Speaker’s seat next year, and while he’s got to be the longest of longshots, his first campaign ad is a doozy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: beer, cocktails, gay rights, links, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 19, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/18/17.

Two Insider posts this week from Arizona, one on Padres and Dodgers prospects and one on Dodgers, Reds, and Rangers prospects. I’ll have one more post coming from this trip. I did not chat this week because I was out at games every day. The trip also meant I didn’t get to review a boardgame this week either.

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

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

And now, the links…

The best longread of the week comes from Patrick Hruby of Vice, on Wisconsin forward Nigel Hayes and his lawsuit against the NCAA, challenging the college cartel’s rules on amateurism.
Also great, although with some caveats: what is the fate of the critic in the “clickbait” age? There’s an underlying argument here about quality of content versus that clickbait mentality, but I think the author lapses into cultural elitism enough to undermine his point.
The world’s only grass-eating monkeys survive in one protected savannah in Ethiopia, but their habitat is under threat from humans and climate change. The photography in this National Geographic piece is stunning.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, who belongs to a crackpot evangelical medical association called AAPS, said that states should decide on mandatory vaccination laws, and the Washington Post showed why this is a terrible idea, in graphical form. They also wrote about the AAPS’ “unorthodox” (read: bullshit) positions on science a month ago. It is absolutely insane that someone so virulently anti-science is running HHS.
An algal bloom in the Gulf of Oman is growing thanks to climate change, which our Clueless Leader says doesn’t exist and/or is a Chinese hoax.
Trump fired US Attorney Preet Bharara earlier this month, perhaps because Bharara was investigating Secretary Price’s stock trades for evidence of insider trading. The move may also benefit Friend of Trump Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News was facing multiple investigations from Bharara’s office.
If you live in Georgia’s sixth district, formerly represented by Price, and are as outraged as I am over the anti-science, anti-civil liberties policies of the current administration, consider supporting Jon Ossoff in the upcoming special election on April 18th.
Congress is threatening to pass a national right-to-work law, which would deal the most serious blow to American unions since the Wagner Act guaranteed workers’ basic rights to organize. There is a legitimate debate to be had on unionization; closed shops can artificially restrict employment, and unionized labor forces can increase prices for consumers, to pick two issues that arise in industries with strong unions. Right-to-work laws circumvent the debate entirely, and serve no purpose but to help enrich employers.
Meanwhile, in Australia, the Rational United States, the Prime Minister has proposed banning unvaccinated children from childcare facilities.
The gluten-free fad may be a symptom of a bigger problem of patients forum-shopping and falling for quacks, like “naturopaths” or “allopathic” practitioners who con patients into submitting to expensive tests for conditions that can only be cured by those charlatans’ treatments.
Gwyneth Paltrow, who has become an expert of pseudoscience and woo, proposed a “goat milk therapy” for parasites that is both stupid and dangerous. Paltrow appears to have the biology knowledge of very small rocks, but that hasn’t stopped her from recommending all kinds of fake “treatments.”
The rise of Elijah Quashie, an amateur food critic in the UK known as the Chicken Connoisseur, led to this Eater piece asking who gets to be a food critic? Is it true, as Quashie said in this interview, that once you start being a critic, then you’re a critic, with no further credentials required? If not, then is criticism of food, art, fashion, etc., inherently elitist, available only to those who can afford the proper background or training?
A basketball player in Maryland was prevented from playing in the team’s first regional final game because she was wearing a hijab. The error was the referees’, not the district or state authorities.
The Guardian did an update and profile of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP chapter head who was posing as a black woman until she was outed by her parents as white. The piece includes an excerpt from her upcoming memoir. I might have found a shred of sympathy for her after reading this, although I still think posing as a person of color and then comparing herself to transgender people was inexcusable.
Reader Stephanie K. passed along this Modern Farmer link from last June on how cold-pressed juice is bad for you and for the environment. Pro tip: eat whole fruit, rather than just drinking juice.
Reader Larry passed along this link from Vice on how lax regulations allow shady used-car dealers to sell cars they don’t own, which in turn become legal nightmares for the buyers.
I’d mentioned a few weeks ago that Kurt Eichenwald had gone after trolls who’d sent him images with the goal of triggering his epilepsy. One of them was just charged with cyberstalking in Texas.
Remember Srebrenica? The Bosnian town just elected a Serb mayor, reigniting long-simmering ethnic tensions in the village and in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole, where the three main ethnic groups are threatening to divide the country into yet smaller states along religious and linguistic lines.
Another reader recommendation (I apologize, I can’t find your tweet): Ars Technica explores some of the boardgames the CIA uses to train officers. I don’t think I’ll be reviewing Collection or Kingpin any time soon.

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

→ 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

→ 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

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