the swamp — Page 6

→ December 8, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/8/18.

I had five pieces for ESPN+ subscribers this week, on the Robinson Cano trade, the Paul Goldschmidt trade, Washington signing Pat Corbin, the Yan Gomes trade, and the Jean Segura trade. I did not hold a chat this week due to other demands on my time.

I have updated my annual posts of recommendations of cookbooks and gifts for the cooks in your life. My top board games of the year columns for Paste and Vulture should both go up next week; I’ll post my year-end music rankings here the week of the 17th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Review of Books looks at the plight of undocumented farm workers in California, under the increased pressure to deport them going back more than ten years, even though these workers are the reason we have affordable (or, more accurate, artificially underpriced) food on our tables.
The Guardian ran an excerpt from a 2016 book called The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell, a fascinating story of a master sergeant in the Air Force who decided to try to sell thousands of pages of classified documents to the governments of Iraq and Libya.
GQ ran a long tribute to the late Anthony Bourdain.
The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat wrote a column lamenting the loss of our ruling class of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men that would have been funny were it not so utterly ignorant; Splinter’s Libby Watson had the best excoriation of the column I saw.
As bad as the Times‘ regular editorial writers are, their investigative journalists continue to churn out good work, like the revelation that Trump employs illegal immigrants at his golf course in New Jersey, including the Guatemalan woman who made Trump’s bed.
Jane Coaston explains the Jeffrey Epstein case, and how he got away with serial rapes of underage girls, over at Vox.
Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that we’re now seeing the “Trump economy,” and it ain’t good. The President inherited a strong economy, and his advocacy of protectionist policies in particular is helping to weaken it.
There’s an actual voter fraud case going on in North Carolina right now, and the perpetrators are – in a shocking twist! – Republicans. The Washington Post has pieces on the operative with a criminal history at the heart of the scandal and on the old-fashioned investigative reporting that has helped uncover it.
Slate’s Jamelle Bouie looks at Republicans’ lame-duck power grabs in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. The national party’s tacit support of these moves should tell you all you need to know about its moral rot.
Author David Neiwert posted a long Twitter thread on the history of the Aryan Nations and related white supremacist groups, in part a response to convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza’s regular claims that “liberals are the real Nazis.”
New York has a piece arguing that Uber’s business model is unsustainable and probably unfixable.
Adminstrators and faculty members at Temple University wanted tenured professor Marc Lamont Hill fired for his advocacy of statehood for Palestine, specifically for using the phrase “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” which some groups use as a code for the destruction of Israel.
The Philippines may be on the verge of a measles outbreak, the result of anti-vaxxer disinformation and conflict between the state and Islamist rebels in the archipelago.
Italy’s pseudoscience-spouting health minister sacked the board of the country’s main committee of scientists, who advised the government on health policy. Giulia Grillo has opposed mandatory vaccination laws and supports the “Five-Star Movement,” which also opposes those laws and has pushed quack ‘cures’ for cancer.
The Weekly Standard‘s David Shabtai argues that vaccine denialists are hurting efforts to protect ‘religious freedom’ by using it as a backdoor way to avoid mandatory vaccinations. There’s a simple solution to this: Ban all nonmedical exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements.
The simplest way individuals can fight climate change is to stop wasting so much food. Food waste is the #1 contributor to landfills, and landfills contribute 14% of U.S. methane emissions. (Methane is a far more potent contributor to climate change than carbon dioxide.)
Climate scientist Michael Mann pre-empted an attempt by a coal industry front group to obtain his emails from the six years he spent at the University of Virginia by releasing them all himself.
New Jersey taxpayers paid $18 million to build a beautiful minor-league ballpark in Camden that was supposed to host an independent league team, which folded a few years later after they couldn’t agree to a new lease. Now taxpayers will spend another $1 million to tear the stadium down.
Parker Molloy explains in the New York Times why Twitter’s ban on deadnaming trans people will promote free speech rather than hindering it.
Utah Representative Chris Stewart (guess) defended the state-sponsored murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by saying “journalists disappear all the time,” which is a hell of a way to encourage people and governments to kill or just ‘disappear’ reporters who are bothering them.
This won’t make anyone mad: A Yale psychiatry professor says Trump supporters exhibit emotional patterns most children outgrow by age five, notably the “might makes right” mentality, which I’d argue also defines most of U.S. foreign policy of the last hundred years. There’s actually a lot more in this piece about how demagogues like Trump manipulate their bases to attain and hold on to power.
A man thought he would put one over on advice columnist Amy Dickinson and the #MeToo movement in general, but he forgot that Dickinson would get the final say, and she drags him appropriately.
The Good Place‘s Jameela Jamil wrote an op ed for the BBC arguing that airbrushing in adverts should be illegal.
The Cut’s “I Think About This a Lot” series is back with a piece by Karen Geier on the parody account PrinceTweets2U’s epic response to Time Warner Cable.
Board game news: Dire Wolf announced the fall 2019 release of Clank! Legacy Acquisitions Incorporated, a joint development with Renegade (publishers of Clank!) and Penny Arcade.
CMON announced a seven-day Kickstarter for a digital adaptation of their game Blood Rage, and it has funded at 1000% already through day five.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, climate change, food waste, free speech, links, north carolina, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 24, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/24/18.

My one ESPN+ post this week covered the James Paxton trade, which included one of my favorite pitching prospects in the minors, lefty Justus Sheffield. I didn’t hold a chat this week due to the holiday.

You don’t have to sign up for my free email newsletter, but you’re missing out on lots of words.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was this Washington Post article that tells two narratives in parallel: a liberal satirist who baits right-wingers with insane (fake) stories, and a retiree who believes all of it is true.
The New Yorker‘s Bill McKibben looks at how climate change and its extreme weather effects are shrinking the planet, reducing the habitable and arable land through rising sea levels, increasing temperatures, and water shortages. He also looks at the ongoing fight to “muddle” public opinion on climate change, spearheaded by Republican officials, oil change executives, and pollster Frank Luntz.
WIRED looks at the shady business of paid influences on Instagram and Youtube.
A survivor of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana spoke to the BBC about surviving the cult and mass suicide, and living with that memory for the last four decades.
An author complained that he had a hard time publishing his (apparently not very good) novel because of sexism against men or something. Wonkette tears his rather naïve complaint to shreds. It’s hard to get a novel published unless you’re already published or otherwise famous, and gender bias or political correctness have nothing to do with that.
A Vancouver, Washington, man broke Indian law and died while trying to ‘bring Jesus’ to the North Sentinelese people, one of the last uncontacted tribes on the planet. His questionable religious intentions aside, visiting an isolated population with all of your developed-world germs is unbefuckinglievably irresponsible. The natives likely have no antibodies for many of the pathogens he was carrying.
A nurse working at a hospital in the path of the California wildfires called her two daughters to say goodbye as the flames approached.
Researchers may have discovered evidence of somatic gene recombination in the human brain, a process of retranscription that appears to occur in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, although the authors were explicit that they can’t say this is a cause of the disease.
One of the country’s largest oil refiners has donated over $1 million to Mitch McConnell’s dark-money group One Nation.
In 2015, Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D) wrote a letter to defend the character of a judge who beat his wife badly enough for her to require reconstructive surgery on her face, saying that it was a one-time event and not the man she knew. Last weekend the judge stabbed his ex-wife to death. The revelation appears to have ended Fudge’s bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as the lead Democrat in the House; it should also end her tenure in Congress.
Seven women are suing Dartmouth, alleging serial harassment and sexual assault by three professors in the psychology and brain sciences departments.
There’s a chicken pox outbreak in very liberal Asheville, North Carolina, a stronghold of anti-vaxxer morons.
And there’s a measles outbreak among the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, thanks to a group calling itself Parents Teaching and Advocating for Children’s Health that has been going to residents’ homes and scaring parents with hoax stories about vaccines.
The mother of a child who has survived cancer tweeted about what exposure to measles meant for her child during chemotherapy, when her immune system was compromised.
America’s new political backwater is Georgia, where the Governor-elect oversaw his own election and purged over a million voters from rolls, many of them persons of color. I have no idea why everyday Georgians are tolerating this subversion of their civil rights.
A dark-money group posted ads on Facebook, using Bernie Sanders’ image, to encourage Democrats to defect to the Green Party on election day. The group in question failed to file required paperwork with the FEC, and Facebook refused to remove the ads when Sen. Sanders’ office requested that they do so. The group’s Facebook page is still active as of Friday night.
Several companies have asked Republican Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith to refund their contributions after she joked about public hangings. She’ll face Mike Espy (D) in a runoff election on Tuesday in Mississippi, where African-Americans make up the largest percentage of the population of any of the fifty states.
Speaking of Mississippi, federal judge Carlton Reeves struck down its abortion ban as unconstitutional, and he had some shit on his mind about the “pure gaslighting” of state legislators over this law and the state’s long history of oppression of women and minorities.
Mumbai-born Garima Amora, a chef in Bangkok, became the first Indian woman to win a Michelin star this month for her work at the restaurant Gaa.
And finally, Our Dear Leader made some utterly ridiculous statements about Babe Ruth – everything short of calling him a black man – but Toronto Star writer Daniel Dale was there to set the record straight.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, frauds, links, mississippi, north carolina, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 17, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/17/18.

My one piece for ESPN+ subscribers this week looked at some major names on the trade market this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I appeared on the Pros and Prose podcast to talk about Smart Baseball and other topics related to the book and reading/writing in general.

I’m back to sending out my free email newsletter every week to ten days or so, as the spirits move me. The spirits usually include rum, of course.

And now, the links…

The Guardian long read looks at the new backlash against plastics, notably against the use and creation of plastic microbeads, which have quickly become pervasive in our environment.
Bloomberg investigates how 7-Eleven is using ICE raids to battle its own franchisees, with lawsuits in both directions, all in the wake of the guilty plea of a Long Island franchisee in 2013 to wire fraud, harboring illegal immigrants, and stealing parts of their wages.
Baltimore County used something called “exceptional clearance” to mark a statutory rape case as successfully closed despite failing to even charge the 29-year-old assailant, who went on to rape another underaged girl in Wisconsin. The practice is common across police departments nationwide.
The Cut has the strange story of “The Watcher,” a stalker who hounded a family out of a million-dollar New Jersey house by writing threatening letters. The writer hasn’t been caught, while some neighbors indulged in conspiracy theories that the victims wrote the letters themselves.
Kevin Alexander writes about the effect best-of lists can have on small restaurants after the burger joint he wrote was the best in the United States closed just five months after the list went up.
Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale has made it his mission to document all of the lies President Trump tells, amounting to thousands just since the vulgar talking yam took office. Dale writes in the Washington Post that fact-checking these lies is easy, since Trump tells the same lies over and over, and uses the same bad rhetorical devices when telling them. Dale also calls out U.S. news outlets for still falling for the same shit over and over again.
The terms of the subsidies Amazon will receive for its two new headquarters locations are out, and they’re quite generous given how profitable the company is. What I have not seen yet is an analysis of whether, say, New York City would be better off if they took the $1 billion in subsidies they’re giving amazon and plowed it into a less exciting investment like upgrading its subway system. Meanwhile, NYC gave amazon land that would have gone to affordable housing instead.
An L.A. musician concocted an elaborate scheme to schedule a European tour for his barely-real band, posing as a promoter, buying Facebook followers, and editing together concert footage to make it appear that his band was playing to big, raucous crowds.
A 19-year-old woman won election to the New Hampshire legislature this month, two years after an old, white, male legislator mocked her efforts to raise the minimum age for marriage in the state (which, I must add, Republicans keep blocking).
A 31-year-old speech therapist got so mad watching Betsy DeVos bumble through her confirmation hearings that she ran for the Superintendent of Schools job in Arizona as a Democrat – and won. She replaces Dingbat Diane Douglas, who wanted to introduce creationism into the public school science curriculum, and becomes the first Democrat in this job in over 25 years.
This month’s Blue Wave in the Midwest could mean a 2007 agreement for midwestern states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions gets a new lease on life.
Former naturopath Britt Hermes, who realized that naturopathy was bunk and blogs about bogus treatments in that field, won this year’s John Maddox Prize, given annually to one or two people for their efforts in standing up for science in the public sphere. She shared it with a researcher who documented the effects climate change and ocean acidification are having on coral reefs.
A new study found that eating less protein may improve the bacterial population of your gut, although the researchers caution that it’s just a single study and needs further confirmation. That said, most of us consume more protein than our body needs, and growing enough animal protein to feed the U.S. has deleterious effects on the environment.
The EPA refuses to enact a proposed ban on a dangerous paint remover that has killed more than 50 people over the last 40 years, but retailers are voluntarily choosing not to carry these products.
The BBC podcast The Inquiry asked how we messed up antibiotics as we head into a post-antibiotic future.
The Polish legislature rejected a “citizens’ bill” that would have abolished rules requiring schoolchildren to be vaccinated against infectious diseases, a bill that would have led to the deaths of hundreds of Polish kids had it passed. Warsaw is suffering from a measles outbreak due to foolish parents who skipped the MMR vaccine. Of course, major autism sites hailed the bill when it was introduced, despite mountains of studies showing no link between vaccines and autism.
Peter Hotez, author of the new book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, looks at the map of U.S. counties with the most kindergarteners who skipped vaccinations. The maps of states and counties he shows are interesting, but the county map tracks population a little too well – highlighted counties include the third, fourth, thirteenth, and fifteenth-most populous in the U.S.
Vice-President Mike Pence stood up for Burma’s Rohingya minority, condemning State Counsellor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to stop or oppose ethnic cleansing efforts by the military government against the Muslim minority.
MLB is butting heads with regional sports networks over the rights and payments around in-market streaming of live games, potentially bad news for baseball fans who just want to watch their home teams’ games and are willing to pay for that right.
Andrew Zimmern of Bizarre Foods spoke to a Taiwan blog about the Taipei food scene.
Someone used fake social media accounts to give the impression of fan support for the Ottawa Senators in the wake of a controversy around players who were filmed mocking the team and its coach.
Tasty Minstrel games has a Kickstarter up for a reissue of Luna, a Stefan Feld game from 2010, in a new “deluxified” edition.
There’s also a Kickstarter for a new game based on the animated series Oddbods, aimed at kids 7 and up.
Finally, the tweet of the week is probably not a true story, but I want it to be:

OH MY GOD ?? pic.twitter.com/CHh24Xy13A

— Daniel Pryor ? (@DanielPryorr) November 16, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board games, climate change, environment, frauds, links, longreads, new hampshire, pseudoscience, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 10, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/10/18.

I didn’t have any new ESPN+ posts this week, with my free agent rankings going up on November 2nd and my trade market overview due to run this upcoming Monday. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday, and did a Periscope video chat on Wednesday (and even played a little something on guitar).

My latest board game review for Paste covers the cute, competitive, asymmetric game Root, where cuddly forest creatures fight battles for control of the forest, and each player has unique pieces, abilities, and paths to victory. It’s quite clever.

Feel free to sign up for that free email newsletter I keep talking about and occasionally remember to send out.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Undark exposes the conservative groups fighting climate chance education in Florida classrooms, as well as how they wage this war and their efforts to bring it to other states. The irony of failing to teach the reality of anthropogenic climate change in a state that might be the most adversely affected by it should not be lost on you.
Working conditions in the Tesla factory would make Upton Sinclair blush; medical staff are “forbidden from calling 911 without permission,” and five former clinic employees told The Center for Investigative Reporting’s writers that the on-site clinic’s practices are “unsafe and unethical.” One source was fired in August by the clinic, which she says is because she raised concerns about the clinic’s treatment of workers. Tesla’s pricing starts around $35,000 for its model 3 sedan to over $140,000 for its Model X P100D SUV.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was still working in a Manhattan Taqueria when she began her campaign for Congress, and Bon Appetit spoke to her there about the intersection between food and politics. She points out that food is intertwined with climate change, minimum wage laws, immigration, health care, education, and more (I’d add trade policy/protectionism, other environmental regulations, and water rights to the list.)
Anti-vaccine PACs helped shape this week’s midterm ballots, as those groups fought to defeat Republicans who weren’t sufficiently anti-vax during primary races. Dr. Paul Offit, who helped develop the rotavirus vaccine, wrote about how he’d like to answer anti-vax loons who still argue that vaccines cause autism.
Ninety-eight year old Roger Angell penned this wonderfully angry essay on the power of voting for the New Yorker, which ran it the day before Election Day.
The deputy editorial page editor for the Washington Post writes that new acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker is a crackpot.
Wisconsin Republicans are trying to strip the incoming Democratic governor of much of the office’s power right now, which is particularly sad given the mess the outgoing Scott Walker leaves in the state’s education budget. Most notable is that he gave Taiwanese company Foxconn up to $4 billion in subsidies and tax breaks, a deal that would have resulted in the state paying about $230,000 per job created … if it had even created the number of jobs promised, which it hasn’t. That money would have filled the education budget gap and then some.
If Brian Kemp wins the gubernatorial race in Georgia, his victory would need an asterisk, according to Prof. Carol Anderson, who has written a book on voter suppression called One Person, No Vote. I said in my Periscope chat this week that when leaders in less-developed countries steal elections, the citizens take to the streets in peaceful protests and workers strike. I never thought we’d need that here, but that may be the only response Georgians have here.
The Kansas City Star exposes the overconfidence and disorganization that sank Kris Kobach’s campaign and gave Kansas its first Democratic win for a statewide office in 12 years.
The Houston Chronicle has had to retract eight stories written by Austin bureau chief Mike Ward after discovering that he’d fabricated dozens of people he quoted in those articles.
Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic that America’s problem is not tribalism, but base racism, given how one of our two major parties seems to rely on race-baiting and trafficking in stereotypes to rally its base. And it works.
Trump mouthed off last week about making the Federal Reserve less independent; Venezuela’s experience demonstrates why that’s a foolish notion. Of course, Trump also blamed the three eastern Baltic nations for starting the war in Yugoslavia, so I don’t think we’re dealing with the brightest bulb in the chandelier here.
A giant supernova named Cow appeared without warning in June and has given scientists a rare look at the birth of either a black hole or a neutron star.
Oakland chef Charlie Hallowell, whose restaurant Pizzaiolo I visited and really enjoyed, is trying to come back to his old life after more than a dozen women came forward to say he sexually harassed them. He’s facing some backlash, but also getting frankly unwarranted support from other men in the business who seem to gloss over his behavior. The landlord for his newest restaurant, Western Pacific in Berkeley, is Lakireddy Bali Reddy, who pled guilty to human trafficking, bringing underage girls from India to the United States so he could have sex with them.
A mob of protesters gathered outside Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house and threatened his safety. Reason argues it’s not just wrong, but actively harmful to the cause. I have zero sympathy for Carlson, who has chosen this life of fomenting bigotry for profit, but I agree with the column. Don’t threaten him or his family. You want to make him stop? Go after his advertisers. Cut your cable subscription. Ask public places you frequent to stop showing Fox News. But threatening journalist won’t help … although one protester says the reports of threats are highly embellished.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford continues to face death threats, moving four times this year, while the man who assaulted her gets to sit on the Supreme Court and decide how the rest of us can live our lives.
A fake doctor in California who promises a “miracle cure” for cancer using baking soda was sued by a patient and hit with a $105 million judgment. The money seems tangential – the point here is that these charlatans prey on the desperate, and the law seems too slow or simply unequipped to stop them.
Dr. Devah Pager died earlier this month of pancreatic cancer at age 46. Her work helped demonstrate that being black in the job market was, in effect, as big of a negative as having a felony conviction was
Comedian Patrick Monahan (no, not the Train guy) wrote about Louise Mensch’s legendary tweet about Steve Bannon possibly getting the death penalty for New York magazine’s The Cut. I take no pleasure in reposting this.
New York beverage director, author, and bitters expert Sother Teague writes about how he uses his role to espouse important causes, as with his NYC bar Coup, where proceeds go to groups fighting the worst policies of this administration. I appreciated this quote in particular: “Diminishing language such as ‘stick to sports’ holds no place and only serves to display the ignorance of those who say it.”
In the last two years, two mental health professionals in Monterey County have taken their own lives, including David Soskin, who drove off Highway 1 at Hurricane Point in June. Less than two years previously, a colleague with whom Soskin had clashed, Robert Jackson, took his own life, having left his job with the county after accusing Soskin of creating a hostile work environment.
This (unrolled) Twitter thread shows the bonkers elections in Alaska from Tuesday, with ties going back 40-plus years. Don Young won re-election yet again; he’s been Alaska’s at-large Representative since 1972, before I was born, after losing the election but taking the seat because his opponent died before election day. Young is still just the fourth Representative in the state’s history, even though he refuses to hold town halls and holds many views best left in the 19th century.
My employer did a nice thing for longtime employees, shutting down the Magic Kingdom for a night to allow Disney cast members of 40-plus years of service to enjoy the park for themselves.
Finally, this magic trick won for the best close-up trick at the International Federation of Magic Societies’ 2018 World Championship of Magic, and it’s dazzling:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, climate change, disney, education, florida, frauds, georgia, journalism, kansas, links, metoo, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression, wisconsin

→ November 4, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/4/18.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I ranked the top 50 free agents this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday, before a brief vacation to Disneyworld to help my parents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter, which isn’t to say the content is better, just that I’m sending it more often.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Washington Post has a long investigation by writer Radley Balko into the rot inside the Little Rock, Arkansas, Police Department that led to an incompetent, racist cop shooting an unarmed 15-year-old black kid, lying about it, and escaping conviction in two trials. The cop in question, Terry Hastings, was hired over the objections of another officer, who pointed out that Hastings had attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting – normally a disqualifying event, but Hastings’ father was also on the LRPD force.
This Atlantic longread by a writer whose grandfather was ostracized for a failed attempt to solve a major physics problem also delves into deeper questions of what drives geniuses and how orthodox institutions treat apostasy.
A Harvard researcher has a new theory of mitochondrial function and evolution that may help lead to new treatments for diseases of mitochondrial dysfunction, including many fatal muscular diseases.
Stalwart indie bookstore The Strand is unionized, making it a bit unusual in the bookstore world, but the store’s very wealthy owners have fought modest pay raises and benefits increases. The Strand is a wonderful store with knowledgeable employees and an enormous selection of new, used, and rare books, but this column says much of its revenue comes from renting out its space rather than the sale of books.
The Washington Monthly has a longread accusing writer Salena Zito, whose pieces cover Trump voters out in rural America, of fabricating quotes and stories and manipulating quotes, as well as other journalistic sins, even as her conservative employers look the other way. She has taught at least one seminar at Harvard’s Kennedy School, but the school hasn’t responded to my request for comment yet.
Was Friends homophobic, ahead of its time, or both? This essay on LitHub argues both sides of it, and explains why the show was too cautious on LGBT issues even as it gently expanded the boundaries of what was shown on network television.
Facebook ignored warnings about Russian interference in Ukraine via troll farms, part of the company’s general unwillingness to look at information warfare outside the U.S. that could have tipped the company off to what Russia did here in 2016.
The white man who shot up a Tallahassee yoga studio, killing two women, was an ‘incel’ who had twice been charged with assaulting women as well as a history of posting misogynistic and homophobic content online. He was still able to buy an AR-15.
President Trump barely works at all, high irony after years of the right criticizing Obama, by all accounts a workaholic, if he dared to take an afternoon to play golf.
The self-immolation of white nationalist Twitter troll Jacob Wohl to smear Robert Mueller is lovingly detailed by The Cut.
Many western billionaires have invested in ‘doomsday’ properties in New Zealand, arguing that its isolation makes it ideal in case of a global pandemic, war, or other apocalypse. They don’t all sound terribly sane to me.
CRISPR gene editing has been long on promise but light on results so far, but a new research effort found it might help treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Transgender neurobiologist Ben Barres died last year of cancer; his autobiography just came out and Nature has a very positive review.
The Supreme Court refused to block a lawsuit demanding that the US government act on climate change. You know my views on the subject, but do we have a constitutional right to a clean environment?
Fourteen teachers at a Middleton, Idaho, elementary school are on paid administrative leave after wearing racist Halloween costumes, as well as dressing up as the border wall with the MAGA slogan on it. I don’t have much hope under this administration, but it seems like a federal civil rights violation took place here.
A pediatrician in California rails against bogus vaccine exemption letters written by doctors who rely on genetic quackery. There is no such thing as a genetic predisposition to vaccine injury. Doctors who claim they have found these cases in children are merely profiteering and should lose their licenses to practice medicine.
The Daily Beast writes that vaccine denial is now a Republican epidemic. Voting for science increasingly means voting Democrat./
ThinkProgress talked to experts who explained that the claims about Bitcoin’s future energy consumption are bogus.
Ethiopia now has a female President, its first in the country’s history. The position is ceremonial, but she is still the sole female head of state in Africa right now, and her selection is more evidence that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who set up a cabinet where half the posts were filled by women, is a great progressive hope for a country that has lived under tyrants since World War II.
The President sputtered out a false claim that he could revoke birthright citizenship by … I don’t know, tweeting about it, which is ironic since his Florida property does big business with Russians who want to give birth on U.S. soil to secure American citizenship.
Haaretz details Trump’s lengthy history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric and tropes to stir up his base, and how that contributed to last weekend’s massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Jewish leaders there told Trump he wasn’t welcome in their city until he disavowed white nationalism. He showed up anyway, and of course has blamed the deaths of eleven Jews in the shooting on the lack of armed guards at the temple.
The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer points out that the inane story of the migrant caravan contributed to the shooting, part of yet another bullshit campaign from the GOP (“but her emails”), this time with anti-Semitic underpinning and violent consequences. As Serwer points out, this caravan is a threat to exactly nobody, and is still weeks away from reaching our border – if it even gets that far.
One other reason the caravan story is codswallop? There aren’t enough people in Central America to matter to U.S. immigration numbers.
Indiana Law Professor Ian Samuel writes in the Guardian that Republicans are close to an invincible grip on power, even as a clear minority party, thanks to vote-rigging, voter suppression, and some favorable SCOTUS rulings. The money quote: “For the first time, a president who lost the popular vote had a supreme court nominee confirmed by senators who received fewer votes – nearly 22 million fewer – than the senators that voted against him.”
Need another reason to vote blue on Tuesday? Global warming is more advanced than we thought, as the oceans have absorbed far more heat than we realized. The oceans absorb that heat, and carbon dioxide, and become more acidic, which leads to the deaths of coral reefs, and that in turn ripples up the food chain and threatens human diets.
The Arizona Board of Education rejected outgoing Superintendent Diane Douglas’ plan to push creationism in public schools, which was just going to lose in court anyway, but what a waste of everyone’s time.
Proof that evolution is real is right before us in antibiotic resistance, which British Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies said last week threatens to take us back to the dark ages.
In a bit of good news, residents of Southampton, England, formed a human chain to help a small community book store relocate, with 250 volunteers passing the 2000 books person to person from the old location to the new one.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-semitism, arizona, arkansas, biology, bookstores, climate change, evolution, frauds, idaho, links, longreads, physics, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines

→ October 20, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/20/18.

My first dispatch from the Arizona Fall League went up for ESPN+ subscribers this week, covering Forrest Whitley, Vlad Guerrero Jr., Julio Pablo Martinez, and more. I’ll file another, likely longer report this weekend.

My latest board game review for Paste covers the Spiel des Jahres-nominated cooperative game The Mind, where all players have to try to play all their hand cards to the table in ascending order – but without communicating with each other at all.

I’ll be at the Manheim Library in Manheim, PA, on Monday, October 22nd, to talk about Smart Baseball and sign copies of the book (which will be available for purchase there too).

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday night. If you don’t get it, you don’t know what you’re missing.

And now, the links…

The most important read of the week is the late Jamal Khashoggi’s final column for the Washington Post, on the need for more freedom of expression in the Arab world. He was killed by Saudi intelligence agents shortly after writing it.
Longreads (and longish reads): Graduate student Urmila Mahadev appears to have solved the verification problem in quantum computing, a major unsolved problem in the theoretical field where researchers lacked a method of knowing if a quantum computer had actually carried our your instructions.
Evangelical writer Jen Hatmaker has built a following through her books and popular blog on her faith and family. Her recent turn into political writing, on how Trump and his supporters are acting contrary to Christian beliefs and teachings, has earned her both praise and vitriol, including death threats.
Popular Mechanics spoke to nine scientists running for Congress this year across the country.
This obituary of a 30-year-old woman who died as a result of an opiate addiction, written by her parents, is crushing, and a good reminder of the humanity of people who fall prey to this increasingly common disease.
The two surviving members of the Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz, have a new book coming out on the band’s history; Vulture has an excerpt on the mis-marketing of Paul’s Boutique.
CityLab examines why public transit works better outside the United States and tackles a few common myths. Most interesting to me: The example of Toronto’s supra-municipal authority considering the needs of the city and the suburbs when building mass transit, and the examples of European cities building bus or metro stations first and developing urban and suburban areas around them. Also, Nashville: WTF?
Sears filed for bankruptcy after its hedge-fund investor owner bled the company of most of its valuable assets, and his recovery plan signals that he’d like to continue to do so.
The Republican Party is coming after Social Security and Medicare as they try to solve the budget deficit, a crisis utterly of their own making due to tax cuts and military spending.
Racism drove white voters to switch to Trump, not economic anxiety. Try not to have a heart attack and die from not surprise.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke failed to disclose his partial ownership of a weapons manufacturer, which creates several conflicts of interest with policy areas of his day job. You’d think that would get him removed from his post, but in this Administration, it’s just his way of fitting in.
Nevada Sen. Dean Heller (guess) pushed the VA to use an unproven and likely fraudulent ‘brain wave’ treatment for PTSD sufferers, because the company offering it has a connection to one of his senior aides.
Virginia Rep. Dave Brat (guess) told a recovering addict that he understood the latter’s troubles because he’s been targeted by negative campaign ads by his opponent. Totally the same thing.
Someone stole a Seattle homeless woman’s car, which was her only shelter at the time, after which it was found and towed. The towing company refused to return it to her, then sold it for $175, then bought it back on a judge’s order but charged her for storing it. She finally got it back after a year of fighting, although the towing company – which is the official towing company of the city of Seattle – claims she owes them over $21,000 in fees.
The conservative Weekly Standard asks why Iowans keep returning white nationalist Steve King to Congress. The Des Moines Register endorsed Democratic candidates across the state, arguing that Republicans have failed in their opportunities at the helms of our federal and state governments while obstructing attempts to stop corruption and collusion with foreign powers.
Coloradans concerned about the deleterious environmental effects of fracking should vote yes on Proposition 112, which would require a buffer zone between fracking sites and schools or water sources like underground aquifers. John Elway recorded a vague TV ad for the oil & gas companies fighting it.
Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital have recommended 31 papers co-authored by a former lab director be retracted because he fabricated or falsified data.
Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent paper claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism has led to a twenty-year decline in vaccination rates, won this year’s Rusty Razor award for bad science. Indeed, the percentage of toddlers in the U.S. who have received zero vaccinations keeps rising.
The state of Arizona had to cancel a parent vaccination education course after negative feedback from about 120 parents, many of whom admitted they hadn’t even seen the course information. Vaccination levels are especially low among Arizona kindergarteners, to the point that the state’s schoolchildren are below herd immunity levels.
A pair of low-level Republican Party employees in Arizona tried to donate to state Democrats in the name of a fictional Communist party.
They’re not the only terrible people in the Arizona Republican Party: Debbie Lesko, who won a special election to replace Trent Franks in the House of Representatives this spring, is flat-out lying about her opponent, Dr. Hiral Tipirneni, in a new campaign ad. Lesko’s district includes a lot of retirees, who ought to be concerned about the GOP’s plans (mentioned above) to cut Social Security and Medicare.
A group of 21 Democratic lawmakers wants to know why the Administration is cozying up to the neo-Nazi government of Hungary, including cancelling a planned grant to support independent media in the former Soviet bloc nation, which has lurched to the right by electing an openly anti-Semitic leader.
Voter suppression in Georgia got more literal this week as county officials ordered 40 black senior citizens off a bus taking them to vote. Meanwhile, a Salon examination found that Secretary of State and current GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp has purged over 300,000 registered voters from Georgia’s rolls.
Kansas, seeing Georgia’s moves, said “hold my beer” and moved the lone polling station in Dodge City, which is 60% Latino to a location outside the city limits. It’s really amazing that I, a white American who has always lived in majority-white areas, have never had any difficulty finding a place to cast my ballots. So weird.
CAP Action found that Florida’s murder rate jumped after the state enacted a so-called ‘Stand Your Ground’ law in 2005.
A new study examines how easy it is to vote in all 50 states, with a ranking from 1 to 50. Oregon is first (easiest), while Mississippi, about 20 seconds removed from blowing up black churches, is 50th. I was most surprised to see three states in the Great Lakes region – Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio – all ranked in the 40s.
The Houston Chronicle endorsed Beto O’Rourke for Senate, saying his opponent, incumbent Ted Cruz, has shown “little interest in addressing the needs of his fellow Texans during his six years in office” while calling out Cruz’s unwillingness to serve as a check on the powers of the President.
Nature says that the biggest risk for a global pandemic comes from misinformation spread by denialists, such as “anti-vaxxers” and charlatans like Wakefield and others selling supplements to those made afraid of conventional medicine.
A reader sent along this link on the best new pizzerias in the state of New Jersey, some of which I will try to hit this winter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, environment, frauds, guns, hip-hop, iowa, kansas, links, physics, rap, religion, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, virginia, voter suppression

→ October 13, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/13/18.

No Insider content this week, but I’ll have at least two posts next week from the Arizona Fall League. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday, and did a Periscope video chat Friday (in which I played a little guitar too).

I’m hoping to get another edition of my free email newsletter out before I fly to Arizona on Sunday, so feel free to sign up for my most random and disconnected thoughts.

If you live in east-central Pennsylvania, I’ll be at the Manheim Library in Manheim, PA, on October 22nd at 6:30 pm to talk Smart Baseball and whatever else you desire.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best and strangest thing I read this week is this account of Bir Tawil, a tiny patch of land in northeast Africa claimed by no country, which several westerners have tried to thus claim as their own. The author is one of those people, and describes the bizarre effort by an American father to claim the land so his daughter can be a princess.
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is pouring tens of millions of dollars into the midterms to protect the GOP majority and thus further advance his economic plans in east Asia, such as building a casino in Japan. Consider the odds of this billionaire’s personal agenda aligning with your own economic interests before voting. Meanwhile, President Trump appears to have done Adelson’s bidding by bringing up the latter’s plans in a recent meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Politico also documented Adelson’s massive cash layout, which is heading to PACs that will likely flood airwaves and mailboxes with attack ads in the next few weeks.
I’ve written about this a few times before, but there’s another piece, this one in WIRED, about how the Cavendish banana is threatened with extinction and only genetic modification might save it. All banana plants are genetically identical, clones of the original from decades ago (when the Gros Michel encountered a similar fate), and thus they are extremely vulnerable to disease because they lack the mechanisms of evolution to survive. I reviewed a book on the topic back in 2013.
Georgetown Professor Greg Afinogenov (an assistant professor, but I’m not sure how that would affect the honorific) writes in N Plus One about the bad faith practiced by the so-called Sokal Squared hoaxers, who claimed to have uncovered blind orthodoxy in so-called “grievance studies.”
I’m still not sure what to make of this BREAKER piece on the bitcoin industry’s many roots in Hungary, which has in turn failed to convert this tech base into meaningful economic growth.
The BBC World Service’s In the Studio podcast spoke to Pandemic/Forbidden Desert game creator Matt Leacock about season 3 of Pandemic Legacy, which Leacock tested at Gen Con this past August. Friend of the dish and onetime BBTN podcast guest Rob Daviau makes an appearance as well.
The American Conservative criticizes Ted Cruz for his ‘sellout’ on criminal justice reform and his attacks on opponent Beto O’Rourke over this issue.
The New York Times reports how the FBI “investigation” into Brett Kavanaugh’s history of sexual misconduct was always limited. People who say the FBI “cleared” Judge Beer are being more than a little disingenuous. One of Kavanaugh’s classmates at Yale Law writes that the investigation was “a joke” in the Indianapolis Star, after he contacted the FBI but his offer of information was rebuffed. The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin argues that the GOP’s “spin” on Kavanaugh isn’t working with voters, but I’m not convinced. I think their supporters heard exactly what they wanted to hear.
Rewire.news looks at research that might explain why white women don’t believe Dr. Blasey Ford, just as they didn’t believe the women who accused Roy Moore of assaulting them.
Think the Kavanaugh fight was just over believing men? The Supreme Court just upheld a ruling that de facto disenfranchised hundreds or thousands of native Americans in North Dakota. That state has a voter-suppression law requiring voters to have a street address to register, but many native Americans living on reservations there only have P.O. Boxes for their addresses. I’m surprised SCOTUS didn’t also order Bismarck to deliver blankets full of smallpox to those residents.
George Will describes the United States’ hard and dangerous shift toward protectionism, which will ultimately harm and possibly even shrink our economy. It’s also not working: Our trade deficit with China hit a record high last month.
Georgia’s Republican nominee for governor, Brian Kemp, is currently its Secretary of State, which means he oversees elections and voter registration, so it’s a problem that his office is refusing to process over 53,000 registrations right now in the most blatant attempt at voter suppression we’ve seen from the GOP so far. His office has cancelled over 1.4 million registrations since 2012, and nearly 670,000 just last year, when Kemp knew he’d be running for the governor’s seat. The New York Times‘s Michelle Goldberg also called out Kemp’s fraudulent tactics. All that matters to the modern GOP is winning, regardless of whether the method is fair, free, or ethical.
For example, in Illinois, the Republican incumbent in Illinois’ 14th district is running a new ad accusing his opponent, Lauren Underwood, of holding policy positions she doesn’t support, such as a plan that would double some voters’ income tax liabilities. (In an ironic twist, the GOP candidate himself voted for the GOP tax bill last winter.)
A story from April reveals that Nevada Senator Dean Heller told supporters that suppressing Democratic turnout was key to holding his seat, allowing him to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Ted Cruz’s national security adviser previously worked for murderous Côte d’Ivoire dictator Lawrence Gbagbo, currently on trial at the Hague for crimes against humanity.
Ah, West Virginia, you ask not to be the butt of our jokes, and then a Supreme Court justice there won’t recuse himself from a case where his personal lawyer is representing one side.
Of course, Tennessee got jealous, so a highway patrol officer working security on the Democratic gubernatorial candidate’s campaign leaked info to his opponent claiming the candidate was at “a Muslim event” that turned out to be a meet-and-greet at a falafel restaurant.
Raleigh, North Carolina’s News and Observer endorsed Anita Earls for the state Supreme Court, who has been targeted by a series of laws passed by the GOP-controlled, gerrymandered-AF state legislature.
Thirsty Dice, a long-promised board game café in Philadelphia, is (probably) scheduled to open this upcoming week. If there’s interest, perhaps we can do an offseason gaming meetup there for dish readers.
Was the supposed comet ‘Oumuamua not actually a comet, and if not, what exactly was the interstellar visitor to our solar system?
I’m assuming everyone here saw the IPCC report on how bad climate change already is and how limited our chance is to slow or stop it; if not, Scientific American has a quick overview of the dire warnings it laid out.
Some videos: If you’re not on Twitter, you might have missed this wonderful little song from Texas singer-dancer-choreographer-artist Lynzy Lab called “A Scary Time.” Within days, she performed the same song on Jimmy Kimmel Live with a small chorus of women and young girls.
Riz Ahmed explained why he fights for representation rather than diversity.
And finally, director Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Everybody Wants Some!!, and the Before Sunrise trilogy) lent his skills to this ad against Ted Cruz in Texas:

NEW tonight: @fire_ted_cruz PAC ad, directed by Richard Linklater https://t.co/FebBWcegbd

— Evan Smith (@evanasmith) October 9, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, climate change, gmo, links, metoo, north carolina, stick to baseball, tennessee, texas, the swamp, voter suppression, west virginia

→ September 29, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/29/18.

My awards ballots for the six major postseason player honors went up this week for ESPN+ subscribers, and I held a Klawchat Thursday to discuss them.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Reiner Knizia’s Blue Lagoon, a light/midweight game that plays very quickly but adds some strategy with complex scoring, and has a cover that might remind you of a certain Disney movie.

And now, the links…

Long reads first: This Politico piece on on the rise, fall, and change of heart of former hard-right Iowa state rep Kent Sorensen is the best thing I read this week. It speaks once again to the power of exposing bigots to the very people they profess to hate.
A Boston University doctor and researcher has made a career of testifying that cases of suspected child abuse are actually rare genetic disorders or vitamin deficiencies; in over ten years he’s never examined an abuse case and determined it was the result of actual abuse. This ProPublica piece highlights inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his statements, and details a case where Holick’s testimony resulted in a baby going back to an abusive parent who subsequently put her back in the hospital with a broken leg and bleeding in the brain. Why BU employs a child abuse enabler, or courts and juries find him credible, is not explained.
A UPenn professor and director of that school’s Annenberg Public Policy Center argues that Russian interference online gave Donald Trump the 2016 election – but she bases her assertion on data, not conjecture, laying out the case in greater length in her upcoming book Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President.
The Daily Beast looked at Barstool Sports’ history of bullying opponents and encouraging sexual harassment. Founder Dave Portnoy often doxxes critics, such as posting this piece’s author’s phone number on Twitter, a clear violation of their ToS, but was never suspended for doing so.
Methane trapped in Arctic ice is starting to leak out as the climate warms. A similar event at the end of the Triassic era warmed the planet so much it led to a mass extinction event that wiped out 76% of all species on earth.
I’ve written before here about how trauma affects the brain, including my review of the seminal book The Body Keeps the Score. In the wake of multiple women stating that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted them, NPR talked to scientists about how trauma affects memory, something that everyone should be taught in schools. We tend to think of memories the way we think of data storage – that we record the information, accurately, and have it there to be recalled when we run the appropriate mental script – but memories are fallible and malleable, with trauma a major reason why our memories of significant events are often wrong or incomplete.
Arizona Senator Jeff Flake asked for a vote delay after previously signaling his support for the nominee, and the link there implies it was the result of assault victims confronting him in an elevator just hours before his announcement. I’d like to think this is true, and that Flake, who says lots of good things and then does nothing to back them up, has decided to take a stand, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
This Twitter thread from a researcher who studies sexual violence includes information, with links to published research, on why we should believe women, including Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who allege they’ve been assaulted.
Padma Lakshmi explained why she didn’t report her rape at age 16 in the NY Times.
ThinkProgress’ Lindsay Gibbs writes about Dr. Ford’s bravery, and watching the hearings as a sexual assault survivor herself.
We excuse young men who assault women because they’re young and their brains are still developing and we don’t want to ruin their lives. We excuse older men who’ve done it because that’s all in the past and they’ve changed since then, of course. Where in this framework do women matter?
America’s crumbling social infrastructure of libraries, schools, playgrounds, and fields is is hurting our democracy, writes sociologist Eric Klinenberg for The Atlantic.
In Texas, a state where most politicians think The Handmaid’s Tale is a utopian novel, the state’s attorney general is supporting a school district that expelled a student for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance, a clear violation of the student’s First Amendment rights, in a case of blatant pandering for votes before November.
Professor of English and Cultural History Joe Moran writes in the Guardian about the difficult of writing a ‘perfect’ sentence, or even deciding what a perfect sentence is.
A new book called Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity argues that there have always been anti-vaxxers, according to this NPR interview with author Michael Kinch.
ProPublica also looks at the so-called “Jobs Alliance” in West Virginia where a coal baron is trying to block natural gas expansion that would actually help a growing industry with a viable future.
A Trump Administration analysis concluded that the planet will warm by 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 so climate change regulations are pointless, bringing a whole new level of cynicism to public discourse.
Trump’s EPA immediately rolled back rules on coal plant pollution into waterways, raising the risk of heavy metal pollution during flooding like that caused by Hurricane Florence.
This long-ish excerpt from Michael Lewis’ upcoming book The Fifth Risk covers the tragicomic inside of Trump’s transition team and shows him as a man who didn’t believe he had any chance to be President.
One new board game Kickstarter of note – Fabio Lopiano’s Ragusa, co-published by Capstone Games, a company that focuses on heavy Euro titles it can translate and import to the U.S.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, first amendment, kavanaugh, links, mental illness, metoo, russia, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, trauma, vaccines, west virginia

→ September 1, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/1/18.

My one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week ranked the best tools among MLB players, which is probably my least favorite piece to write each year. And I held a Klawchat this week.

I reviewed the incredible new board game Everdell for Paste this week. It’s got a Stone Age vibe, but adds so much more to that worker placement framework, and the artwork is some of the best I have ever seen.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: There’s a new health scam out there, targeting desperate people like cancer patients, that claims that food-grade hydrogen peroxide can cure many ailments. There is no such thing as food grade hydrogen peroxide, which has never been proven to treat any disease and is very, very dangerous to consume at even moderate doses.
Esquire looks at the imminent global water crisis, caused by overuse, pollution, climate change, and unwise or even deleterious government policies. This, not Islamist terrorism, is the greatest threat to global stability for this century.
Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, has a new book coming out titled Breaking News, on how the business of news has broken the concept of news; his old paper has a lengthy excerpt that focuses on a major phone-hacking scandal within Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
Recode’s Kara Swisher interviewed OB/GYN and GOOP debunker Dr. Jen Gunter, which you listen to as a podcast or read in a transcript. It’s funny and also very telling about how patients use “Dr. Google,” and how people like Gwyneth Paltrow take advantage of the gullible and the desperate to line their own pockets.
Mother Jones investigates the broken federal student loan forgiveness program, which has had problems for years but has taken a bigger dive off a cliff under Betsy DeVos.
A few weeks ago I posted a story about a female NYU professor accused of harassing a male graduate student, after which many women stood up for her, the predator, not the victim. A graduate student who studied with that professor writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that she believes the accuser, saying that Professor Avital Ronell is a bully while questioning her academic and feminist bona fides.
Conservative writer, evangelical Christian, and Iraq War veteran David French and his wife adopted a two-year old girl from Ethiopia in 2010. He writes for the Atlantic how he has seen attitudes of Americans shift towards hate against his daughter, his wife, and himself for daring to cross racial lines in the name of love. He also covers some policy changes from the current and previous Administrations that have discouraged such adoptions from outside of the United States.
BlacKkKlansman includes a line from David Duke where he mentions being a friend of technology pioneer and Nobel laureate William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor and founder of Shockley Semiconductor (from which the Traitorous Eight left to found Fairchild Semiconductor). I had no idea that Shockley became an inveterate racist shitstain and eugenics proponent.
The “age of privacy nihilism” is upon us, although I’d argue nothing has really changed – we’ve given away our data for decades, in exchange for the occasional coupon for 50 cents off Nutter Butters.
Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by a man because she dared to say no; that man was Latino, possibly in the U.S. illegally, so within hours of her murder, the white supremacists in power chose to politicize her death (which, I was told, we’re not supposed to do when a white man shoots up a school or a church). Her family is having none of it, and her father came out to show his gratitude for and support of the Iowan Latino community.
The Nordic countries’ economies are often held up, with good reason, as exemplars of Western democracies that use broad social safety nets and other progressive policies to produce high employment rates with low rates of poverty, homelessness, and crime. They also tend to score very high on economic “happiness indices,” but the BBC points out that such rankings obscure increasing mental health issues in those countries, especially among younger citizens.
The collapse of the Venezuelan state and economy has led to a growing refugee crisis in neighboring countries, with this Washington Post article focusing on the Brazilian town of Boa Vista.
The ongoing European measles epidemic has killed 37 people and sickened 41,000 – and remember, children can survive measles only to die of the virus a decade later due to an incurable condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).
Roland’s Market, the new Phoenix restaurant and collaboration of Chris Bianco and the Holguins (Tacos Chiwas), earned a very positive review from the Arizona Republic.
The Arizona Republican Party packed its Supreme Court, and just got a big win from their efforts, as the Court blocked a ballot measure that could have funded state schools with an extra $690 million. The proposed question had over a quarter of a million signatures. The governor who stuffed the Supreme Court is facing a challenge this November from David Garcia, a Democrat, a veteran, and an education professor at Arizona State. If he wins, he’ll be the first Latinx governor of Arizona in 44 years.
A neuroscientist discusses how skimming rather than deep reading can alter our brains for the worse.
This is simply perfect.

Give Him a Shot pic.twitter.com/RVtd7tVY3L

— Light Roast Comics (@lr_comics) August 27, 2018

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, history of science, links, metoo, phoenix, privacy, pseudoscience, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, Venezuela, water crisis

→ August 25, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/25/18.

I had one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week, scouting notes on Tampa wunderkind Wander Franco and some Yankees & Rangers prospects, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the gladiator-themed deckbuilding game Carthage for Paste this week. That’s the last of my pre-Gen Con reviews; I believe everything I review the rest of the year will either be from games I got/saw at Gen Con or that were released afterwards.

I’m about due for a fresh edition of my free email newsletter, to which you may wish to subscribe if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ESPN’s Jackie McMullen has an excellent piece on the NBA’s progressive efforts to help players battle mental health issues, interspersed with insights from Kevin Love, Paul Pierce, and other players who’ve dealt with anxiety, depression, and panic disorder.
The Guardian looks at TripAdvisor at a crossroads, beset by fake reviews and dealing with many of the same questions of responsibility for content that affect larger tech outfits.
Ten billion dollars a year goes to ‘charities’ who aim to shape public policy, which can both alter public discussion and political votes on topics while also depriving the U.S. Treasury of tax revenue from the associated income. That’s just one revelation in Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece on the new era of philanthropy, where the wealthy have more power than ever and often wield it through their foundations.
Radiolab looked at Facebook’s own problems with regulating hate speech in a recent podcast episode that I found very thorough – it doesn’t let Facebook off the hook, but does a solid job of explaining some of the difficulties they face in making decisions on what content to allow and what to delete.
The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks if we might see another AIDS pandemic as global health initiatives slow and major aid donors (notably the U.S.) reduce their funding. If our government continues its lurch towards theocracy, you can bet AIDS research and international aid for AIDS treatment will drop.
Russian trolls/bots may have been spreading vaccine denialist views on social media, although Dr. David “Orac” Gorski argues that the media coverage has overstated its prevalence.
Orac was busy this week, with another post on how the Australian edition of 60 Minutes ran a puff piece on a quack stem cell clinic. So-called stem cell therapy has become the next big thing in separating gullible or desperate patients from their money, but the science itself is unproven and very much in its infancy.
Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith writes in the conservative Weekly Standard that there is sufficient grounds for impeachment, and that may lead Trump to try to fire Mueller and any other investigators working on the collusion case.
How do microscopic plastic particles end up in our food chain? Researchers have found so-called microplastics in water supplies, in beer, and even in aquatic creatures we consume, with unknown consequences for the ecosystem and our bodies.
The multi-level marketing scheme known as Herbalife has been around, and been accused of being a scam, for decades now, but somehow they always skate by. (They’re a major sponsor of the LA Galaxy soccer team, and as good an argument as you’ll see for not putting corporate sponsor names on jerseys.) A new lawsuit alleges that Herbalife’s system of paid seminars misleads attendees by promising wealth while siphoning off their money.
Uganda, one of the few African countries where baseball has a presence, may be about to descend into chaos as a popular singer turned rising opposition politician has been jailed and beaten by agents of dictator Yoweri Museveni. Protests against the detention and Museveni’s oppressive rule continue to grow.
Corruption in Louisiana: The state’s Senate President, John Alario, has twice spiked a bill legalizing ride-sharing services to help his friend, who sells insurance to cab companies. This story appeared on ProPublica two days ago; it hasn’t been picked up by any local Louisiana news outlet since.
New EPA rules, relaxing regulations on clean, beautiful coal, will lead to 1400 more deaths per year and up to 15,000 additional cases of respiratory problems, including asthma, due to the fine particulate matter emitted by coal mining and production.
Brooklyn-based pizzaiolo Paulie Gee has been talking about opening a New York-style slice shop for years now, but it appears it will finally open at Franklin & Noble this month.
N.K. Jemisin won her third straight Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Stone Sky, and her five-minute acceptance speech is well worth your time, as it’s by turns funny and inspiring.
My Twitter friend Parker Molloy wrote for the Guardian how she can’t root for the Cubs after their decision to acquire Daniel Murphy, who has expressed anti-gay views without ever retracting or revising them.
Asia Argento, a prominent victim of Harvey Weinstein’s predations, now stands accused herself of statutory rape of a 17-year-old boy; we can believe her claims on Weinstein but still hold her accountable for her own transgressions.
Kelli Ward is running for Jeff Flake’s Senate seat in Arizona on a platform of pro-Trump, white nationalist talking points; she’s even been campaigning with Weird Mike Cernovich, the conspiracy theorist who gained an audience by pushing the bullshit Pizzagate story.
Blake Fahrenthold resigned from Congress over a sexual harassment scandal that U.S. taxpayers helped clear up for him, but blames everyone except himself for his career’s demise.
Georgia’s GOP is trying to suppress the black vote in November by closing polling stations, using the Americans with Disabilities Act as its justification. Majority-black Randolph County did reverse its plans to close seven of nine polling stations after the public outcry. If you live in Georgia, make sure your elected officials know you support voting rights and oppose any attempts to suppress the vote. And voters in other areas should know this is part of a broader, national vote-suppression effort using the same flanking maneuver.
The Washington Post‘s Elizabeth Bruenig argues that it’s time to stop thinking of ‘socialism’ as a dirty word in a piece that argues largely for ‘democratic socialism,’ which is a poorly-named platform of social welfare policies that by and large doesn’t actually require socialism. Socialism has a specific historical meaning: government ownership of major means of production and distribution. It’s been tried all over the world, and it has failed, as it wipes out many of the incentives that drive human decisions in the marketplace. If you want to argue for a stronger social safety net and for policies that strive to reduce structural discrimination and inequality, that’s a debate worth having, but it’s not ‘socialism.’
The New Republic‘s Sarah Jones writes (in a piece from April) that the real campus free speech problem is on the right, not on the left, highlighting cases of punishment for views handed down by evangelical Christian colleges.
A Kansas City TV station suspended a reporter for sharing an article on white privilege on her Facebook page. The incident may also have led to her termination; a KC Star editorial argues that the station was in the wrong. The reporter’s lawsuit against KSHB is still pending.
Amazon appears to have set up a slew of astroturfing Twitter accounts to fight news coverage of poor working conditions at its warehouses.
Researchers at MIT and Harvard have developed a genome test that may help identify patients at greater risk for diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, and a few other common, often deadly diseases.
The longstanding hypothesis on the cause of age-related cognitive decline has been neuron death and insufficient replacement of those cells to make up for the loss. New research may counter that, showing that the cause might be lost neuron plasticity, which was reversed in mice using the drug fluoxetine, better known as Prozac.
Hua Hsu writes in the New Yorker about the ‘end point’ of representation and the hit film Crazy Rich Asians, the success of which has brought the term representation (back) into the mainstream conversation. Representation matters to the people who haven’t been represented, and if that inconveniences you as someone who has never had to think twice about seeing people who look and sound like you on the big or small screens, well, tough.
Red Raven Games has a Kickstarter running for the second edition of their game The Ancient World.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, arizona, charity, environment, hugo award, links, medicine, pizza, pseudoscience, representation, science fiction, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, voter suppression

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