the swamp — Page 8

→ December 16, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/16/17.

The MLB winter meetings were a bit slow this year, but I did have five new Insider pieces this week, covering:

• The Dodgers/Atlanta salary swap and the Matt Moore trade
• The Santana and Cozart signings, plus the Galvis trade
• The Piscotty and Kinsler trades, and the Shaw/McGee signings
• The Marcell Ozuna trade
• A quick take on a few interesting Rule 5 picks
• The Giancarlo Stanton trade

My ranking of the top ten new board games of 2017 went up at Paste on Sunday evening. My latest game review for the site covers Ex Libris, a fun, light strategy game that’s extremely well balanced, and made my top ten as well.

The holidays are upon us! Stick a copy of Smart Baseball in every stocking.

And now, the links…

Longreads: WIRED looks at the three Minecraft-playing entrepreneurs whose DDoS botnet caused the October 2016 Internet outage in the eastern United States.
ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ESPN The Magazine, an investigation of how adidas money took over the University of Louisville.
The Boston Globe Spotlight team looks at the evidence behind Boston’s reputation as a racist city and finds that … yep, it’s racist. I lived in the Boston suburbs for about 18 years, including my time in college, and my personal experience was that the city was highly segregated: There was a large black population, but they all lived Somewhere Else. Diversity in whiter neighborhoods was limited to people from east or south Asia, but rarely included African- or Latino-Americans.
Also from WIRED, a look at the big money effort to build a professional e-sports league around the game Overwatch.
A former sharecropper in Lowndes County, Alabama, a majority-black county with a population just over 10,000, spends every Election Day encouraging and driving her neighbors to the polls, one of the many great stories emerging after Doug Jones’ surprise victory over the Ayatollah of Alabama on Tuesday.
Slate argues that the new concealed-carry reciprocity law is unconstitutional. It was also widely opposed by law-enforcement groups, and the inevitable lawsuits to stop it are going to waste a lot of everyone’s time and money.
The Trump Administration told the Centers for Disease Control they can’t use the words fetus, diversity, transgender, evidence-based, or science-based in upcoming budget request documents. That’s yet another reason to support efforts to elect scientists to public office, such as 314 Action.
Salon calls the Republican Party the American Taleban in response to the party’s massive rollback of policies of previous administrations, with the goal of keeping a portion of the population “undereducated.”
New York‘s Jonathan Chait claims that the Mueller investigation is in great peril; I’m just not informed enough to know if this is valid, melodramatic, or a bit of both.
USA Today‘s editorial board, hardly a bastion of the left, called out Trump’s implication that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand would trade sex for campaign donations, saying “A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.” You’d think Republican women in Congress would be outraged, but nah.
The New York Times compared the blatant falsehoods told by Presidents Obama and Trump, finding that Trump is offering lies at 60 times the rate of his predecessor, telling more lies in less than a year in office than Obama did in eight. (They list the specific falsehoods, if anyone wants to cry “fake news.”)
The US Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a hospital worker fired for refusing a flu shot can’t claim religious discrimination, as the court ruled that anti-vaccination beliefs are not religious in nature, and that the scientifically accepted view is that vaccines are not harmful.
Celebrity chef & Food Network icon Mario Batali has now been outed as a sexual harasser & groper, and has been fired by The Chew as a result. He issued a weak apology that ended with a cinnamon roll recipe.
Ken Friedman, the co-owner of West Village restaurant The Spotted Pig, has been accused by several former employees of harassment and assault, another great piece of investigative work from the New York Times. The Spotted Pig is co-owned by chef April Bloomfield, who is accused of blowing off complaints from female employees about Friedman.
Salma Hayek’s piece on how Harvey Weinstein harassed her and nearly derailed her career in retaliation is just brutal to read. Director Peter Jackson revealed that Weinstein forced him to drop Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd from the Lord of the Rings movies in further retaliation against the women for rejecting his advances.
Thrillist’s Dan Gentile listed the 21 best coffee roasters in the country, and based on my experience it’s quite a credible list. I’ve tried nine of these, and would probably not have included La Colombe of those on the list, but would vouch for the rest. I’d also add Archetype (Omaha), Cartel (Phoenix), and Bird Rock (San Diego/La Jolla).
In July, the podcast Startup interviewed the Yemeni-American behind the $16 cup of coffee that made headlines in 2016. His story is remarkable, as he’s had to educate Yemeni farmers and then process and ship the beans out of an active war zone.
In the wake of the Keaton Jones story (and the milkshake duck epilogue), Teen Vogue looks at how the traumas of young black girls don’t get the same kind of public empathy. She also argues for greater mental health treatment for traumatized young kids, which is a core tenet of the book I reviewed yesterday, The Body Keeps the Score.
Yet another former Facebook exec has come out against the power and effects of his old employer and social media in general, saying it’s “ripping apart society.” I agree social media is showing some rather pernicious effects, but I also feel like this talking point is a very good way to make money on the speakers’ circuit when you used to work there.
This New York Times story on the alt-right’s attempts to build a parallel social media world is mostly funny but a bit scary that they could even find funding for all of these failed efforts.
Paste posted its ranking of the top 30 video games of 2017. I’ve heard of maybe five. I did just buy a new laptop that’s supposed to be quite good for gaming, so maybe I’ll dive in this year.
Thames and Kosmos has two new titles out just in time for the holiday with Legends of Andor: The Last Hope and the Ken Follett-inspired A Column of Fire. I probably won’t be reviewing these, but do have a stack of games to review to take me well into February; that should include Majesty: For the Realm, the brand-new title from the developer of Splendor.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, coffee, links, mental health, Sports, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, video games

→ December 2, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/2/17.

My Insider post on Shohei Ohtani is finally up, with a scouting report compiled from aggregating opinions of multiple scouts who’ve seen him hit and pitch, and thoughts on what MLB’s rigging of the rules against him really signals. Between the lack of significant activity in the hot stove and the fact that I got quite sick in the middle of the week, that’s been my only baseball content since Thanksgiving. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the train game Whistle Stop, a mid-weight title that’s among the best new board games I’ve played this year. My ranking of the top ten games of 2017 will go up the week of December 10th. EDIT: My first piece for Ars Technica is up now – a look at a beta version of Catan VR, an upcoming digital port of the global bestseller from Asmodee Digital.

I’ve taken an unintentional hiatus from my free email newsletter, but will resume this week. The holiday, PAX Unplugged, and that virus I had have all conspired against me, I swear.

Smart Baseball is out now in hardcover, e-book, and audio formats, perfect for your holiday shopping! Buy one or forty copies, your call.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Cut has a piece from a woman who wasn’t told her unborn child would have cystic fibrosis, and thus wasn’t given the opportunity to even consider an abortion.
A video, not a longread, but worth the twelve minutes: The New York Times went to hurricane-ravaged Barbuda, which was completely evacuated before the second of the two category five hurricanes hit in September. There’s a rising fear now that the government in Antigua will use the evacuation as an excuse to overturn the Barbudan way of life, which has not included private ownership of land over 300 years of settlement.
I am old, because I don’t really understand why a person of no apparent talent would be a “Youtube star,” but that is where we are as a culture today, and the fans of one particular persona, Alissa Violet, caused serious real-world consequences for a Cleveland business and several individuals they doxxed.
A scare campaign by science deniers, aided by credulous Japanese media, has all but eliminated HPV vaccinations in Japan, ostensibly an educated nation. A Japanese doctor who spoke out against these anti-vaxxers and faced death threats for it has won this year’s Maddox Prize for her work.
If you live in Florida and have school-aged children, well, I agree with this Tampa Bay Times piece decrying a Republican-supported bill to block ‘objectionable’ topics from curricula. If a parent complains – say, an evangelical Young Earth creationist dad – then material like the theory of evolution could be knocked out of a high school biology class.
Vanity Fair asks if we will soon see the end of the social media era. I doubt it; they’re too pervasive to just go away, but as with every wave of technology, they will likely be superseded by something (or things) that borrow elements of social media and add new features or capabilities to pull people away. None of this will address the biggest concern around social media – the speed with which they allow falsehoods, from fake political news to anti-science bullshit, to spread around a country or even the world. To stop that, we need more education to protect us from ourselves.
The Deseret News points out that advocates of so-called “religious freedom” should look at the prevalence of laws against blasphemy, which derive (in Judeo-Christian countries) from a Biblical commandment.
Should Lauri Love, a Finnish-British hacker with a lengthy list of mental and physical health problems, including depression and Asperger’s syndrome, face extradition to the US for stealing confidential data during a lengthy (and obviously planned) campaign of intrusions into American government systems? It’s not quite as clear cut as it might sound, even though I still think he should be extradited after reading this piece.
ProPublica looked at a $1900 ear piercing at a Colorado hospital as part of a longer story on why health care costs so much.
Roy Moore, who still seems very likely to win this month’s special election for the open Alabama Senate seat, wrote in a textbook that women shouldn’t be allowed to hold office. As much as the news cycle has focused on his history of sexual misconduct, his history of anti-gay, anti-Muslim, and anti-women positions and statements are a more direct concern for how he would act as a legislator.
Meanwhile, here’s the Washington Post‘s original story on a right-wing group’s fraudulent story on Moore, attempting to trick the paper into running a false accusation against him.
More Moore: One of the Alabama evangelical ministers loudly supporting him was himself convicted of blocking an investigation that his son molested orphans in Honduras. And the New Yorker interviewed Alabama women for their thoughts on Moore’s behavior and comments on women, including their unworthiness for public office.
Republican Thomas Kean, who served two terms as New Jersey’s governor and now heads up the Environmental Defense Fund, argues that Trump needs to fire EPA head Scott Pruitt.
John Kennedy, a Republican and the junior Senator from Louisiana, has come out against several unqualified nominees for the federal judiciary. This isn’t about policy positions, but about pure qualifications. I do not expect to agree with this administration’s nominees on questions like strict or loose constructionism, but I think it is reasonable to still expect the nominees to hold sufficient experience and to pass established ethical standards.
A woman I went to high school with questioned why Matt Lauer’s first accuser waited so long to come forward. The NY Times has an explanation from psychologists about why that and other myths used to doubt victims are false.
One of my Senators, Chris Coons, wrote an op ed on the benefits of bipartisan tax reform, a few weeks ago. It doesn’t mention anything about small-hours votes on unread, handwritten bills, though.
More Delaware news: the 76ers are teaming up to build a new facility for their developmental league affiliate … with unspecified funding from the state and the city of Wilmington. I’ve already contacted one of my two legislators to voice my total opposition to any use of public money for a private sports facility.
A new treatment for migraines, using antibodies to alter the brain chemicals thought responsible for the crippling headaches, has shown tremendous promise in early tests.
This Washington Post piece provides a solid, balanced look at net neutrality, which has become a bit of a catchphrase. I favor net neutrality, but there are reasonable arguments that the companies making last-mile investments are more than just dumb pipes. Meanwhile, FCC chairman Ajit Pai is mad that people are mean to him on social media and seems to be arguing for regulating such sites.
Cities are lining up to hand power over to Amazon to land the company’s second US headquarters. Dave Zirin argues that this is the consequence of publicly funded sports stadiums becoming the norm over the last thirty years.
The BBC has a piece authored by two women who were both ‘gaslit’ by the same psychologically abusive boyfriend.
I reviewed the film Lady Bird on Thursday; actress Beanie Feldstein, who played Juliet, wrote asking people to stop complimenting her on her weight loss, given how hard she worked before that to learn to accept her body as it was.
Will Leitch asks in New York magazine if we are looking at the end of the NFL.
A hate group calling itself the Alliance Defending Freedom is fighting transgender student rights across the U.S.. The link lists specific states where the group has been active, often via filings in court cases, if you’d like to oppose a group of people who refer to a young transgender student as “a girl who perceives herself to be a boy.”
UPROXX’s Brian Grubb argues that The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best adaptation of the Charles Dickens story. I tend to agree, but for many different reasons, and I don’t share Grubb’s perturbation/obsession with the process or results of Muppet sex.
Asmodee Digital has been busy, releasing Carcassonne for Android and Steam this week, and announcing a port of the new-ish game Gloom (not related to Gloomhaven) due out in March.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, boardgames, links, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 18, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/17/17.

I had one Insider column this week, on Friday, looking at a few free agents who might sort of possibly perhaps be bargains this offseason. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday; that will be the last chat until after Thanksgiving.

If you’re at PAX Unplugged in Philly this weekend and have a copy of Smart Baseball, I’ll be signing on Saturday afternoon at 3:30 pm.

Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, which I send out … I guess whenever I feel like it. I aim for once a week, although I’ve gone as long as two weeks between issues when I haven’t had much to say. You can see past issues at that link.

And now, the links…

Longreads: The Daily Beast on the murder of a Navy SEAL by two of his comrades in Mali after the victim realized his eventual killers were stealing cash.
I didn’t realize that Second Life still exists, with a small but loyal user base. I tried it once for maybe an hour and gave up. I found it both annoying and hard to use.
Texas Monthly profiles Tania Joya, the ex-wife of a Texas man who became a Daesh fighter and propagandist. She’s now back in the US after a hellish experience in Syria with her then husband and their three kids.
WIRED examines a long-running case of digital harassment that nearly ruined the victim’s life and still hasn’t quite ended despite a seven-figure civil judgment.
Also from the Atlantic, a consistent producer of great longreads, the search for the origins of racist troll Andrew Anglin, who runs a popular neo-Nazi website and actively encourages the doxing and threatening of his critics.
Michael Lewis looks at Trump’s dismantling of the USDA from the inside in a long piece for Vanity Fair. The process here is inexcusable, but the USDA has not been very good at many of its responsibilities, including policing safety in our food supply.
A former lobbyist for the pesticide industry is at the Department of Agriculture and fighting to deregulate these chemicals, granting wide and possibly unethical access to her former colleagues on the industry side. It may not be safe to go back in the water.
Author Rebecca Traister says we are all implicated in the current reckoning on sexual abusers, observing how we still worry for the fates of the men accused more than the women they victimized.
In my review of City of Ghosts, I mentioned the liberation of Raqqa last month. Well, it turns out the “liberation” involved buying off Daesh fighters, bribing them and letting them leave the city safely.
The New Yorker looks at the bullying tactics behind the shutdown of DNAinfo and Gothamist by Joe Ricketts, who opposed the writers’ desire to unionize.
The Colombian soda industry, with help from the country’s government, has silenced a consumer group that was raising awareness of obesity, fighting for a tax on the sodas and running ads linking them to obesity. I am not a fan of sugar taxes, but this is beyond heavyhanded for a country that is trying to present itself to the world as a functioning, modern democracy.
The Kansas City Star has been doing important investigative work on malfeasance in Governor Brownback’s administration, with this latest piece asking why the government is blocking even basic transparency with constituents. There’s no good reason for any government to hide this kind of information from voters. There are many bad ones.
American oil and gas companies no longer have to disclose how much money they’ve given to foreign governments, opening the door to unfettered, unreported bribery.
Actress Mara Wilson, who played the title character in Matilda, wrote about how society sexualizes young girls, as she found out as a prepubescent movie star.
With all due respect to Blake Shelton, Shepherd Smith became the sexiest man alive this week.
I included a post last week about disturbing Youtube videos aimed at kids; the site responded quickly and plans to age-restrict such content.
There’s a beautiful minor-league ballpark in Camden, New Jersey, just over the bridge from Philly, without a tenant, and it might be torn down. NJ.com looks at how the $35 million taxpayer expense has gone for naught.
Bruce Arthur wrote about how Jays fans need to “get over” the loss of Alex Anthopoulos, who exit from Toronto was mishandled by the team’s ownership.
The faculty at my alma mater rejected a motion that would have allowed single-gender social groups at the school. Harvard does not have fraternities and sororities, but has long-standing, off-campus “finals clubs” that serve a similar purpose. (I was not a member of one and barely even saw evidence of their existence while there.)
Astronomers found a planet that might be suitable for life just 11 light-years away from us. The EPA responded by issuing blanket permits for drilling and mining for the new body.
The abusive parents in Canada who were convicted of failing to get medical help when their toddler had meningitis – which killed him – still don’t get it and are ranting about the justice system. They’re anti-vax, anti-science people who are now expecting another child whom they won’t vaccinate or provide with modern medicine.
A stem-cell researcher hopes to run against Republican Dana Rohrabacher for California’s 48th Congressional district.
A Trump judicial nominee wrote about politics on a sports site and didn’t disclose it. That’s the same guy I mentioned last week, whom the ABA rated “not qualified” for the bench.
I saved a slew of links on the Alabama special election, but it’s just been so well-covered elsewhere that I’ll only include two here: conservative columnist George Will endorses Doug Jones and calls Roy Moore “an embarrassment,” and David French, also a conservative, explains why “due process” is not a reasonable standard when considering candidates. Also, there’s a site that shows which politicians have supported, renounced, or waffled on Moore since the revelations of his sexual assaults against young women appeared.
And by the way, Al Franken groped a woman and otherwise forced his attentions on her in 2006, and he should resign.
The Atlantic also published an expose on the correspondence between Donald Trump, Jr., and Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign.
FEMA contracted with a tiny Georgia company to send “meals” of junk food to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico.
The FDA issued a warning about herbal supplement kratom, which is used as a pain treatment and as a possible way to fight opiate addiction, but which is unregulated and can thus be laced or tainted with unlisted, toxic ingredients.
TLC has given a forum to a quack healer who claims he can cure infections and chronic diseases through energy healing.
I’ve never been a Brand New fan, but I know many of you are; their lead singer stands accused of inappropriate contact with minors, including soliciting nudes.
Ars Technica looks at some of the hottest new games from Essen SPIEL 2017, the world’s biggest boardgame convention, with over 1000 new titles introduced there.
Handelabra Games is currently running a Kickstarter for a Steam adaptation of One Deck Dungeon.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, astronomy, baseball, harvard, links, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ November 11, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/11/17.

I have a new boardgame review at Paste, covering the card-drafting game Skyward. I also had two Insider posts go up earlier this week, one previewing some potential offseason trade targets, the other ranking the top 50 free agents this winter. And I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Also, don’t forget to buy copies of Smart Baseball for everyone on your Christmas list! Except for infants. They might eat the pages. Get them the audiobook instead.

And now, the links…

Longreads: You probably saw this remarkable New Yorker piece by Ronan Farrow on how Harvey Weinstein used PIs and former spies to track and harass his accusers. If he could do that, think of the other rich, powerful men who stand accused (or have yet to be accused) of sexual harassment and assaults, including a former president and a current one both accused of similar acts. They’ve probably done it too.
This 2015 piece from the Guardian details a failed effort to turn the Comoros into a citizenship-for-sale destination for Bidoon, stateless Arabs living in wealthy countries without actual citizenship or even documentation. The Comoros are a desperately poor island country between Madagascar and mainland Africa, beset by repeated coups since they became independent of colonial France in 1975. Needless to say, the plan didn’t work out well for the the tiny nation.
ProPublica details how right-wing trolls harassed three of its reporters via low-cost methods like filling their inboxes with subscriptions to newsletters.
James Bridle went very long on algorithm-driven kids’ videos on Youtube and more, arguing that such pablum is damaging our kids. (I would also suggest that parents not give their kids unfettered access to any part of the Internet, but that’s just me.)
Scientific American gives us Journey to Gunland, on how more guns do not mean less crime, even though many Americans believe the opposite. The more guns in a state, the more violent crimes, including shootings and rapes. They also ran a rebuttal from a pro-gun social scientist they mentioned, and then (scroll down from there) a rejoinder from the original author.
Are American private colleges and universities making inequality worse as tuition increases and income gaps in the population of potential students grow?
Roy Moore, who believes gays should be jailed or killed and Muslims banned from Congress, sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl in 1979 and behaved inappropriately with several other women in their teens. Several leading Republicans called on Moore to withdraw from the Senate race if the allegations are true.
David French of the National Review cautions conservatives not to dismiss or ignore the allegations. David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times about the cowardice of the “if true” admonitions, which leave the speakers a perfect out.
Utah Representative Rob Bishop is close to his goal of “invalidating” the Endangered Species Act.
Trump’s voter “fraud” commission, which is itself based on a fraudulent premise that pervasive voter fraud exists, has been sued by one of its members, alleging violation of transparency laws and other malfeasance by the Republican members.
A Trump nominee for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench who was unanimously ranked “not qualified” by the American Bar Association was approved in a party-line vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. The judge referred on his blog to “Hillary Rotten Clinton” last year and pledged support for the NRA. If you have a Republican Senator from your state, this would be yet another good reason to call and ask him/her to vote against Talley’s confirmation from the full body.
The swamp is so swampy that minor imbroglios like, say, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lying about $2 billion in personal wealth just sort of slip under the radar.
They did, however, force one unqualified nominee to withdraw: Michigan state legislator Tim Kelly has his nomination pulled after it was revealed he wanted all Muslims banned from air travel. He’s also said that women aren’t interested in STEM careers, and efforts to encourage girls to pursue such careers are a waste of money. This leaves unanswered the question of what the hell his home district in Michigan is thinking.
One of my Senators, Chris Coons, is demanding an explanation for the ‘resignation’ of U.S. Attorney Dana Boente just days before Robert Mueller announced the first criminal charges in his investigation of the President’s campaign ties to Russia. Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked for Boente’s resignation in late October.
A Kansas City Star investigation led Antonio “Rico” Soave to end his campaign for Congress, as the story uncovered multiple instances of graft while Soave was the state’s Commerce Secretary – and forced Kansas Governor Sam Brownback to admit he’d fired Soave in June.
A fungus called coffee rust threatens the world’s arabica crop, exacerbated by climate change that extends the fungus’ active season.
Climate change is killing farm workers around the world, contributing to the rise of a deadly kidney disease or disorder of unknown cause. I heard about this from a reader who saw in my email newsletter that I like Flor de Caña rum; he mentioned to me that working conditions for their sugar harvesters are abysmal, and they’ve had a rash of deaths due to this disorder.
Also from the Guardian, those supposedly financially disciplined folks in Congress destroyed an expensive Arctic ice probe rather than pay to store it … because the probe would facilitate research on climate change. You read that right: They threw away a major investment because they didn’t want further proof we are warming the planet.
Louis C.K.’s film I Love You, Daddy has been pulled from distribution before its release due to revelations of his past sexual harassment of women. Meanwhile, Mel Gibson’s latest movie is out in theaters, even though he’s a pretty terrible human being too.
Paste calls on all comedians repped by 3 Arts’ Dave Becky to drop him as their manager, as he is accused of facilitating Louis C.K.’s sexual harassment of other comedians.
Tom Colicchio wrote a widely-praised open letter to male chefs urging them to do more to change the culture of restaurant kitchens, which he argues accept harassment as standard operating procedure and thus stymie the efforts of young female (or, I’d imagine, LGBT or nonbinary) chefs to advance in the industry.
Some baseball links: Fangraphs’ Jeff Sullivan asks if the pitch-framing market efficiency is closing.
Baseball America‘s Teddy Cahill looks at increasingly early college commitments from teenaged players, a practice everyone dislikes but no one wants to address.
Lindsey Adler (at Deadspin) had the best piece I saw on the Baseball Prospectus writer who didn’t exist. Ryan Schultz was the online persona of a girl, who started the act at age 13 and is now 21, who catfished numerous readers and writers via social media and later multiple sites.
Mike Tanier writes on Bleacher Report that the NFL has passed the point of no return with Colin Kaepernick as teams give quarterback jobs to vagrants grabbed off the streets rather than call the principled former 49er.
The World Health Organization is now advising farmers to avoid using antibiotics in healthy animals, given the practice’s contribution to the evolution and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Why hasn’t California cracked down on anti-vaccination doctors? These quacks are exploiting “medical exemptions” rules, but so far, none has been charged with any form of fraud. If you live there, call your state rep or senator to demand real action on this, before there’s another measles outbreak.
There’s a new shingles vaccines that is vastly more effective in older patients than any previous vaccine. It uses a new type of adjuvant that might change how vaccines, especially those for patients over 50, are developed.
Michigan Republicans are pushing forward bills to allow concealed carry in churches and schools.
Cincinnati politicians are trying to gift FC Cincinnati team owners with a publicly-funded stadium in the town’s Oakley neighborhood. Call your local reps and tell them you know what a colossal waste this is.
I agree with President Trump! The federal government needs to revoke the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status. It’s a real-estate holding company running a long con on members, and harassed its way into this status in the first place.
Is vermouth making a comeback? Sales are on the rise, largely due to the wine’s use in certain cocktails, like the Negroni and the Manhattan, which are seeing revivals as well.
A Macallan 1878 bottle reported to be worth $300,000 has been exposed as a fake, likely produced between 1970 and 1972.
Astronomers have discovered the first known star to survive a supernova, eventually exploding five separate times over a two-year period.
Mental floss looks at how the death of a chemist in 1996 changed how labs handle dangerous chemicals forever.
Five tips for helping your anxious child (or yourself). They check out for me at least.
Anti-abortion activists are very successful on Twitter, says a pro-choice writer for DAME magazine. Much of what she describes here, like hashtag hijacking, reflects a flaw in the machine, exploited well by one side.
Necessity breeds invention: Food shortages in North Korea have boosted a black market in privation foodstuffs, many of which are made from soybeans.
The 7 Wonders app, in development for at least two full years, will be released for iOS this Tuesday, November 14th, with an Android release coming on December 20th.
An English reporter who happens to be black interviewed white supremacist Richard Spencer on camera, and he let the racist show his true colors. If anything, I wish Younge had let Spencer keep talking; he’s hardly the well-groomed intellectual he pretends to be.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alcohol, anxiety, baseball, chemistry, climate change, coffee, food safety, links, longreads, rum, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ October 28, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/28/17.

No new Insider content this week, as I was writing up the top 50 free agents package. That and a look at the offseason trade market will run the week of November 6th. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

I spoke with Arizona’s KJZZ about my book Smart Baseball and the rise of Big Data in the sport. You can find links to buy the book here.

I also run a free email newsletter with personal essays and links to everything I’ve written since the previous newsletter. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you, and yes, I’m overdue to send another one out.

And now, the links, with boardgame stuff at the end as usual…

I don’t know how anyone could have missed it, but it turns out a tiny Montana firm with ties to the Secretary of the Interior somehow got the biggest contract to restore power in Puerto Rico. Then the Daily Beast‘s Ken Klippenstein got a hold of the contract itself, with some sweetheart clauses to protect this little company from pretty much anything, like, say, getting sued for doing a bad job. And now the White House is slowly backing away from the deal. Drain the swamp, indeed.
The longread of the week was clearly the New Yorker‘s profile of the Sackler family, who’ve made billions by selling opioids, often to addicts rather than people in pain. I wonder if any institutions, including my own undergrad alma mater, will return the money the family donated or take its name off any buildings.
The Atlantic goes long on the potential negative impacts of increased personalization of news – that is, limiting what each of us sees based on what each of us seems to want to see. There are some positives from the algorithms behind these feeds, but newsrooms need the right people and technology to profit from them.
The New York Times looks at how an EPA stacked with former chemical industry officials is rolling back regulations on the use of chemicals where there’s strong evidence of harm to humans. Even more notable is the EPA PR official’s response to a request from the author here, which reads like a Facebook comment.
As more and more women come out against Harvey Weinstein, the women who’ve accused our current President of sexual harassment wonder why these accusations haven’t affected Trump at all.
North Carolina’s state legislature might be the most vile in the nation. The Republicans who control it are trying to rig the courts via gerrymandering after multiple judicial defeats.
Economist Paul Krugman says Trump’s proposed corporate tax cut amounts to $700 billion in foreign aid because of how much of corporate America is foreign-owned – and asks why on earth we would want to do that.
Media Matters argues that the Clinton/uranium investigation is “bullshit” promulgated by Breitbart and Sean Hannity.
The Environmental Defense Fund lists five environmental rules that industries have asked Trump to eliminate. As you might expect, they’re rules that attempt to protect consumers and/or the environment, but raise costs for certain industries.
Millennials are paying for news, contrary to every bit of nonsense you’ve heard about what millennials won’t do or what thing they’re ruining now. I wonder if some of this is a desire to get news from reliable sources given the prevalence of both fake news and highly biased ‘news.’
A Cornell professor who oversees a $22 million federally-funded program to improve school lunches has been accused of misinterpreting, omitting, and otherwise screwing up the data behind several of his studies, leading to at least three retractions by journals of papers he’s published. The New York Times explains one of those retracted studies, on kids and cookies. What I can’t find, shockingly, is any evidence the USDA might pull his funding.
Chef Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate, opened a pop-up in London called wastED, selling foods made from ingredients that would normally be discarded. He’s done it in NYC too.
A new Dark Matter coffee shop in Chicago will give 100% of its proceeds to suicide prevention while also serving as an outreach location that will provide support and training to the community.
Anthony Bourdain spoke candidly to Slate about his role in encouraging ‘bro culture’ in restaurant kitchens as the industry is dealing with the John Besh scandal (and surely more to come).
Amazon has been deleting unfavorable reviews for an anti-glyphosate book that has been accused of relying on weak or junk science, while also allowing reviews by associates of the author (a violation of amazon’s terms) to stay up.
Vulture (for whom I write occasionally) has oral history of the Seinfeld episode “The Contest”, which is particularly interesting for what went on with the network.
Paste (for whom I write more than occasionally) looks at the inherent violence within Castle Wolfenstein II, including the uncomfortable ‘storyline’ in the game.
Hillsborough wants to put the new Rays ballpark in Ybor City. Who’s going to pay for it? Are Florida voters dumb enough to fall for this trick yet again?
A man in Portugal beat his ex-wife with a nail-studded club and avoided jail because the Portuguese judges said his anger was understandable, citing an 1886 ruling and the Bible. A Portuguese politican called it “Sharia law in the Court of Porto,” a fair warning given the rise of hard-right theocrats, including Senate candidate Roy Moore, in the last two years.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has an agreement to develop a quayside neighborhood of Toronto, which a lecturer in the ethics of technology warns is a dangerous precedent.
Audio link: Richard Thaler, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, appeared on NPR’s The Hidden Brain to discuss the predictability of our unpredictability.
Author Patrick Tomlinson presented a thought experiment that he says puts the lie to anti-abortion arguments. Ben Shapiro, himself a pro-lifer, responded on his site, although I think at least two of his four points really miss the mark.
An Indian researcher and former English professor has worked for years to catalog the nearly 800 languages spoken in India, a number that may have dropped by 50% since 1960.
Boardgames! The Kickstarter for ROOT, a new asymmetric game from Leder Games, blew past its modest $24K funding goal in the first five days.
Asmodee announced Fantasy Flight Digital, a new division that will bring FFG titles to tablets and Steam. Fantasy Flight is best known for its Star Wars miniatures and dice games, Netrunner, Game of Thrones, X-COM, and new hit Legend of the Five Rings, but also has some straight Eurogames like Hey That’s My Fish and Ingenious.
Asmodee also released a teaser for the upcoming app version of the complex strategy boardgame Scythe.
The New Yorker looks at the ‘resurrection’ of Dungeons & Dragons, although I know the game never really went anywhere, and of course it inspired hundreds of later games, both RPGs and many tabletop games that integrate role-playing or dungeon crawl elements.
I don’t care for Scrabble or the knockoff Words with Friends, but enjoyed this Vice piece on how WwF essentially hacked the game via its user-generated dictionary.
Rama.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, boardgames, food waste, gmo, Languages, links, longreads, stick to baseball, taxes, the swamp, tv

→ October 14, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/13/17.

For Insiders this week, I posted my first batch of scouting notes from the Arizona Fall League, covering prospects from the Cardinals, Yankees, Brewers, Orioles, Padres, Cubs, Rockies, and Twins. I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

Later today (Saturday) I will be at Changing Hands in Phoenix, at 2 pm, to talk about and sign copies of Smart Baseball. I’ll also be signing books at PAX Unplugged, a new boardgaming convention that takes place in Philadelphia the weekend before Thanksgiving.

And now, the links…

Longread of the week: The New York Times on the rise of severe anxiety among American teenagers. The piece doesn’t really get at the question of why we’re seeing more cases, but does explore various treatment options and explain various signs of anxiety for parents to know.
As Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis deepens, with hospitals still without power and short of medicine and clean water, the President is threatening to pull FEMA and military support from the U.S. territory. Meanwhile, the 100,000 American citizens on the Virgin Islands are also largely without power and water several weeks after Hurricane Maria.
The New Yorker asks how many Puerto Ricans will move to the mainland given the awful conditions and awful federal response on their island. The money quote, from a Puerto Rican man whose house was destroyed by a Maria-induced mudslide: “All (Trump) brought to Puerto Rico were those napkins. And you know what everyone’s wondering? What we’re expected to wipe with them: our asses, or our tears.”
And the President, whose own Secretary of State called him “a fucking moron,” may be mentally unraveling, according to Gabriel Sherman for Vanity Fair.
DeAndre Harris, who was beaten by white supremacists in Charlottesville in August, was himself arrested on a dubious charge, as one of the racists did an end-run around police and convinced a (white) magistrate to issue an arrest warrant for Harris. The Washington Post has more on this story.
An Indiana lawmaker introduced a bill requiring journalists to be licensed by the state police. If you live there, maybe call your state reps and remind them of the existence of the First Amendment.
Video: A Connecticut man, angry after the Paris attacks of 2015, shot up a local mosque (after dark, while it was empty). Then he met the Muslims who worshipped there, and everything changed.
A terrorist tried to blow up the Asheville airport last week, but the media coverage has been virtually nonexistent.
A new study from the Food Climate Research Network at the University of Oxford found that grass-fed cattle don’t fight or reduce climate change. Previous theories held that grazing cattle would encourage carbon sequestration in the soil, but this study found the cows still … um … toot too much for that to matter. (Of course, grass-fed beef may taste better, may be more healthful for us to eat, and might be nicer to the cows themselves, since they’ve evolved to eat grass, not corn or soybeans or, worst of all, animal flesh.)
The Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry is retracting a junk-science anti-vaccine study mere weeks after publishing it. The study’s authors are familiar with the retraction process, having submitted a similar pseudoscientific paper to Vaccine in 2016, only to find it pulled back.
Gene therapy was hailed as the next great advance in medicine in the mid-1990s, but couldn’t delivery on its promises in that timeframe. Now its time might have arrived, as an FDA panel endorsed a gene therapy protocol to treat a rare form of retinal dystrophy, an inherited disorder that causes blindness in children.
Senate candidate Roy Moore, the Ayatollah of Alabama, claimed for years he wasn’t compensated for his work for a local non-profit when in fact he was receiving $180K a year for part-time work for the organization.
The University of Wisconsin has passed a new student conduct rule that threatens students who disrupt or interfere with others’ free expression with explusion. In other words, if a UW student group were to invite, say, white nationalist Richard Spencer to speak on campus, and a student disrupted his speech, that student could be suspended or expelled for it. The ACLU opposes the policy.
Shake Shack is introducing automated kiosks to take orders, possibly a response to rising minimum wage laws. I hate seeing low-wage jobs eliminated for automation, but as a fan of Shake Shack, I would say my #1 issue with the chain is the frequency of incorrect orders.
Bananas have been under threat for decades from a fungus that causes fusarium wilt (also called Panama Disease), which renders entire plantations incapable of producing fruit. Australian scientists might have a new banana that resists the fungus – but it’s genetically modified, which many people believe, incorrectly, is a Very Bad Thing.
Asmodee Digital just released an app version of the boardgame Smash Up, which is available for iOS devices, Android, and Steam.
Videogame developers are increasingly including pay-to-play loot boxes in games to try to counteract the industry’s punishing economics. The tabletop industry hasn’t had that problem yet, as consumers in that space seem more willing to pay $40-plus, even $100, months after a game has been released.
Sony plans to make a Settlers of Catan movie, which sounds like a really terrible idea.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anxiety, boardgames, climate change, first amendment, food science, links, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, videogames

→ October 7, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/7/17.

My lone Insider piece this week looked at the top under-25 players on playoff rosters, so of course someone complained that I’d left Manny Machado off the list. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Next Saturday, October 14th, I’ll be at Changing Hands in Phoenix, talking about and signing copies of Smart Baseball, starting at 2 pm ET. This Changing Hands location serves beer and wine, which may help make me more interesting.

And now, the links…

This BBC piece on a young adult who daydreams constantly, a habit that may be a disorder called maladaptive daydreaming, was the best thing I read this week.
Runner-up: An Eater piece titled Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks.
The LA Times ran a six-part series on a con man who romanced women by pretending to be a doctor.
A woman whose fetus had a malignant tumor describes having an abortion at 23 weeks and why Republican attempts to ban such procedures are cruel.
The Trump Administration is refusing to let Puerto Ricans use food stamps to buy hot meals even though electricity and fuel are scarce on the island. But hey, they have those paper towels.
Trump’s pick for an EPA position overseeing chemical safety has previously argued that kids are less sensitive to toxins than adults (this is not true, by the way). Dourson defended himself at a confirmation hearing as “very science.”
Kris Kobach is trying to weaken key federal voter rights protections, part of his bogus “voter fraud” effort that continues despite the lack of any evidence of voter fraud occurring in recent elections.
Senator John Thune (R) of South Dakota blamed the Las Vegas shooting victims for failing to “get small” when the gunfire began. He’ll win reelection handily.
Harvey Weinstein is a sexual predator who has abused his power in the movie industry to harass young women and worse. I would like to see the industry turn its back on him, but given their recent history, I doubt that’ll happen. The New York Times has been calling on Democrats to cut ties with him, but it seems like that’s already starting, just nowhere near fast enough.
Sweden’s economy has more restrictions and higher tax rates than that of the United States and most other European nations, so why does Sweden have so many startups? The answers hinge largely on how laissez-faire you like your capitalism. There are good lessons here for when we have adult supervision in the United States again.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to three scientists for the 2015 discovery of evidence of gravitational waves as predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein.
The Red Cross stands accused of failing to deliver aid to victims of Hurricane Harvey despite a massive fundraising effort after the storm.
Contrary to popular belief, tropical forests add CO2 to the atmosphere, rather than trapping it. Of course, it’s because of what we’ve done to those forests.
The Guardian looks at how the residents of the Scottish island of Eigg bought their own island back after years of private ownership.
Splinter listed every member of Congress who took money from the NRA and then tweeted that “thoughts and prayers” bullshit after the massacre in Vegas.
American fast-food outlets like KFC may be contributing to the rise in obesity in African nations like Ghana, according to this NY Times report.
Modern humans of non-African descent may owe some of our looks from Neanderthal DNA.
The Stranger‘s David Lewis posted as a white nationalist and attended a Seattle neo-Nazi convention.
The British pharmacy chain Superdrug is under fire for selling homeopathic products that don’t work. The firm that manufactures them won’t back up claims of efficacy, probably because homeopathy is bullshit.
A Detroit mother is going to jail for violating a court order to vaccinate her son, an order to which she had previously agreed. This is more a question of custody and family law than of science, but notable because she trots out the “able to make medical choices for my child” canard. Courts have ruled repeatedly that parents cannot deny medical care to their children, and have ruled that governments can require or, in case of epidemic, force vaccinations over parental refusals.
A small biotech company plans to introduce apples that don’t brown, but won’t specifically label them as “genetically modified” for fear of scaring off consumers. I’ve generally favored labeling GMOs because consumers do have the right to know what they’re buying, even if their choices are dumb, but this speaks to the rising science-phobia and anti-intellectualism across our culture.
A recent study by the National Soil Project found that soils from organic farms sequester 26% more carbon than those from conventional farms. If you have journal access, you can read the original paper here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, links, physics, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ September 30, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/30/17.

My one ESPN column this week is a free one, covering my awards picks for 2017, excluding NL Rookie of the Year, the ballot I was assigned (again). I also held a Klawchat on Friday.

I reviewed Azul, one of my favorite new boardgames of the year, for Paste, which will be my last review for them until November. I will continue to post reviews here in the interim.

My book, Smart Baseball, is out and still selling well (or so I’m told); thanks to all of you who’ve already picked up a copy. And please sign up for my free email newsletter, which is back to more or less weekly at this point now that I’m not traveling for a bit. I also have a new book signing to announce: October 14th at Changing Hands in Phoenix.

And now, the links…

Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are disasters after Hurricanes Irma and Maria swept through the northern Caribbean. The New York Times has had several superb (if horrifying) articles on the islands, like the massive economic toll in the Virgin Islands or the devastation of Puerto Rican farms.
Meanwhile, Nero is fiddling, and San Juan’s Mayor is done being polite, and the U.S. Army general in charge of relief efforts says he hasn’t been given enough troops or equipment. The Washington Post documents how the government’s response was delayed while the President played golf.
Longread of the week: Nicole Chung, who was born here to Korean immigrants and then adopted by white parents, writes about what it means to be “American” and dealing with family members who voted for Trump. Some of what she’s gotten back from family members, including her adoptive parents, is just appalling; I doubt I’d ever speak to my parents again if I were in her shoes.
A pair of must-reads on the Kaepernick/NFL/protest story from the New Yorker: Jelani Cobb on “ungrateful” as the new “uppity,” and David Remnick on Trump’s race-baiting demagoguery on the issue.
A Colorado University study found that vaccine denialists are getting louder and more pervasive on Twitter. Those of us who live in the real world and rely on evidence need to be just as loud in our defense of vaccines – and to fight to eliminate non-medical exemptions for schoolchildren.
A nurses’ union in Boston is suing Brigham & Women’s hospital for mandating flu shots. If you’re not willing to get a flu shot – safe, effective, and important for health-care workers – perhaps find a field other than medicine?
Jezebel looks at a new denialist ‘documentary’ about fraudster Andrew Wakefield, who lost his medical license in the U.K. after fabricating data that he then claimed showed that the MMR vaccine causes autism (it doesn’t, just to be ab-so-fucking-lute-ly clear on the topic.)
A fake Boston “antifa” account accidentally outed itself as Russian-based this week, but that’s far from the only fake leftist account run by Russian trolls.
Wild Beasts’ Boy King was my #2 album of 2016, but it’s also going to be their last as the British quartet announced that they’re calling it quits, with a new EP of leftover Boy King tracks to represent their final release.
The headline: “A Southwest passenger complained about dogs on her flight. Police forced her off the plane.” The full story: She claimed she had a serious dog allergy but didn’t have the required medical certificate. All the news coverage I saw made Southwest Airlines the villain, but it seems to me that the passenger was unreasonable. (And the police, but that’s another matter.)
Iraqi Kurds voted overwhelmingly for independence, a referendum that was quickly denounced by the Iraqi government and the Turkish government, the latter of which has a decades-long history of oppressing the Kurdish minority and whose autocratic President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is already threatening to starve them. If the Kurds do declare independence, this could be a Timor-esque situation and potential genocide … and our current President has done nothing but express admiration for Turkey’s dictator. Oh, and one of his resorts hosted a Turkish Airlines golf event last week.
Justice Neil Gorsuch voted to uphold the death sentence of a man convicted by a racist jury. Slate points out here how Gorsuch lied in his confirmation hearing because that’s just how it goes these days: Say whatever it takes to get elected/confirmed, then do what you wanted to do all along afterwards.
Swamp update: Trump nominated a candidate to head the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance who has previously worked for a Church of Scientology-funded health “board”. It’s a con – all of Scientology is – and while it may qualify him for this administration, we shouldn’t hire fraudsters for the DoJ.
Trump’s tax “reform” plan includes eliminating the estate tax; Bloomberg wrote in December how repealing it would be a huge windfall for him, his family, and his Cabinet.
Keith Olbermann argued that the President is using the Pittsburgh Penguins as his own political pawns (video).
The unelected official known as Ivanka Trump is taking steps to hide which Chinese suppliers manufacture Ivanka merchandise.
A number of Harvard professors have come out to publicly criticize the University’s handling of Michelle Jones and Chelsea Manning, revoking Jones’ admission and Manning’s invitation to speak in apparent bowing to public pressure.
FiveThirtyEight’s Rob Arthur has a deeper look at the juiced baseball in MLB this season.
CBS Sports’ RJ Anderson looks at catcher concussions and MLB’s battle with head trauma.
Columbia Journalism Review looks at how “pivoting to video” doesn’t really pay off.
Ugandan President (who has been in power since 1986) spoke about how genetically modified organisms will be critical to meeting his country’s food needs. You can buy non-GMO if you want, but don’t be fooled: It’s not better for you, and we will need GMOs to feed the world.
Roy Moore is the Republican candidate to fill the open U.S. Senate seat from Alabama. He believes homosexuality should be a crime. He’s also probably going to win.
St. Louis police practices have come under fire recently, such as these sweep arrests that brought in many innocent people last week.
In the wake of Hugh Hefner’s death, the Washington Post revisited the murder of Playmate Dorothy Stratten, shot by her ex-husband after her career took off.
With the Law and Order brand name now applied to a true-crime miniseries, The Ringer looks at how the original format found success by avoiding challenge, and how that formula won’t work with this current iteration.
Some local news: A Delaware mom says she was never informed her son was bullied or got in a fight at Maple Lane Elementary School in Claymont, the town at the northeastern-most tip of the state. The school officials appear to have failed to fulfill their obligations under state law here, which, of course, makes me wonder if this is an isolated incident.
Cape Cod isn’t exactly known for good food, but the Chatham Bars Inn, a well-known luxury resort on the eastern edge of the Cape, has started its own farm a few miles away in Brewster.
This started a few weeks ago but I just caught it last Saturday – Iowa Hawkeyes fans have a new and wonderful tradition: After the first quarter of each football game, they turn and wave to watching patients at the neighboring children’s hospital. Hey Iowa, you may produce some of the worst politicians in the country, but I’m glad you’re nice to sick kids!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, harvard, links, Music, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ September 23, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/22/17.

I wrote three pieces for Insiders this week: scouting notes on Yu Darvish, more notes on Aaron Nola and some young Phillies hitters, and my annual look at players I was wrong about. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I’m down to biweekly game reviews for Paste, so the most recent one is from last week, covering the great Days of Wonder-published title Yamataï, by the same designer who won the Spiel des Jahres (game of the year) this year for his game Kingdomino.

And now, the links…

Our federal government and many state governments continue to deny that anthropogenic climate change exists, even as multiple U.S. states and territories are battered by hurricanes (possibly) made worse by warming oceans. Our military, however, has accepted climate change for over 25 years and is planning around it, given its attendant security risks and operational challenges.
The New York Times reports that a massive drop in international travel to the U.S. cost our economy $2.7 billion just in the first quarter of this year. This kind of economic contraction hits everyone, including lower-income people in the service industries that gain directly from tourism spending.
Longreads: Indy Week, a North Carolina alternative newspaper, ran a three-part investigative series this July on the environmental and quality-of-life damage wrought by industrial pig farms in that state. I reviewed Barry Estabrook’s book Pig Tales, on the rise of Big Pig, this summer; he detailed how the North Carolina state government bent over backwards to remove regulations on industrial pork producers. This is the result: The swamp you want to drain is actually full of pig feces.
The Guardian offers a long, deep look at Luxembourg’s attempt to move from tax haven to space-mining haven, courting investors who wish to privatize celestial assets like asteroids. The piece touches on many subjects, including the tiny European duchy’s odd history and questions of sovereignty.
The Verge looks at climate change, India, and the war against heat. Climate change will affect the entire planet, but heavily populated tropical countries may take the worst hit.
And my last longread of the week is on Longreads itself: a thorough look at the history, purpose, and problems with the federal Freedom of Information Act. Among other notable bits: why are fourteen federal ‘food boards,’ like the American Egg Board, now exempt from open records requests? (Because they might be breaking the law, of course.)
If you have kids, you need to ensure they get vaccinated against meningitis. A mother in England whose daughter died of meningitis type W shares her story; the girl came home from school very sick, but the telltale MenW symptoms weren’t there, and she died the next day.
Florida Power & Light has written – literally – state regulations that helped it to $1.7 billion in profits in 2016, including rules that forbid homeowners from powering their own houses with solar panels. And if the power grid goes out, you have to turn your solar panels off. In one of the sunniest states in the country, you can’t power your own goddamned house because the power company said no. I wonder if FPL is okay with candles.
The classic real-time strategy videogame series Age of Empires will return this fall with a new edition, and Ars Technica has a very long look at the history of the genre, including a lot of obscure titles I didn’t know. I loved the original AoE and AoE II but never could beat the thing on Emperor level.
Roy Moore is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, and has a real chance of winning, despite a total disregard for the doctrine of the separation of church and state, and such views on people of color as referring to Native Americans and Asians as “reds and yellows”.
A similar reactionary conservative is running in Arizona against incumbent Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who was a critic of Trump prior to the election but has cheerleaded many of the President’s nominations and orders, including that of Betsy DeVos, as Flake and DeVos share an antipathy towards public education.
Meanwhile, the swamp is rank: Health & Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a member of a fringe, anti-science doctor’s group, was caught billing taxpayers for expensive charter flights when commercial routes would have saved tens of thousands of dollars. Then he got caught doing it more. Vox has an overview of how he bilked taxpayers out of $300,000 by doing so.
And it’s getting ranker: the President has nominated a lobbyist who fought regulations to keep certain chemicals out of consumer goods to lead that regulatory program in the EPA.
Oh, I’m not done: he’s also nominated unqualified campaign workers to fill science-oriented positions at the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA is often useless, but this practice might gut the little it does to help ensure a modicum of safety in our food supply, or to stop rampant pollution from food producers like the pig slaughterhouses mentioned in the longread above.
The coalition governing Iceland collapsed last week due to revelations of pardons its leaders were giving to convicted child molesters.
Tim Grierson looks at the fabricated mystique of “unplugged” concerts and albums.
A Royals fan in southern California donated a kidney to a Giants fan, and the donor told the recipient (they were friends already) with some help from the Giants and AT&T Park.
If you didn’t see this when I tweeted it last week, this story on the research grant that led to BRCA1 is absolutely remarkable and it too has a baseball connection.
Also from last weekend, Amber Tamblyn is done with men refusing to believe women, retelling the story of how James Woods tried to pick her up when she was just 16 years old.
This sounds like abuse, not love: actor Ian Somerhalder, whom I’d never heard of till Friday, threw out his wife’s birth control pills so she would get pregnant.
The rehabilitation of Sean Spicer is already well underway, according to Lauren Duca, with his Emmy appearance and tour of the talkshow circuit. Maybe we should pump the brakes, says Jay Willis at GQ.
Garrett Martin, my editor at Paste, asks Jimmy Kimmel to keep up the righteous anger and dispense with the jocular asides that detract from his very real, important message.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Store Full of Bullshit is now selling psychic vampire repellent. At least they’ve moved on from selling things for women to stick up their vaginas.
Should a restaurant that’s been awarded 3 stars by the Michelin Guide be allowed to withdraw its entry from the critical publication? The chef-owners say they want to cook their style of food without worrying about meeting someone else’s standard or maintaining the rating.
A neo-Nazi was walking around Seattle wearing a swastika armband and screaming at people on the street; various people, some of whom identify themselves as “antifa,” used social media to spread the word and find him, after which one of the activists knocked him unconscious with one punch.
Pete Wells of the New York Times named Razza in Jersey City as New York’s best pizza, which resulted, according to my sources, in a three-hour wait this past Wednesday night.
The late John Saunders, also of ESPN, wrote in his memoir of how his abusive father turned his best day into one of his worst.
Is The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness author Nassem Taleb a racist using flawed beliefs to justify investing in the Syrian regime? There’s some background to this, including links from within that piece, that was new to me; I thought Taleb was still a darling of pop-intellectual circles since his first two books became bestsellers. (I read The Black Swan and enjoyed it.)
Some white dude on Facebook, a friend of a friend of mine, posted a meme about how blacks owned slaves in antebellum America, so stop claiming it’s all racism or some such nonsense. The thing is it’s a lot more complicated than that, as Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates wrote in a 2013 post at the Root. Even better was the other white dude who responded that “slavery ended 150 years ago. Get over it!” Easy when those weren’t your ancestors in chains, I suppose.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, environment, florida, india, links, Music, pizza, pork, racism, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines, video games

→ June 3, 2017
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/3/17.

My second first-round projection (mock draft) went up on Tuesday, and I held a Klawchat, in which some guy got mad at me for answering a question about my first-round projections by including that link, on Friday. It’s bad enough civility is dead, but must we continue to mutiliate its corpse?

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the light detective/puzzle game Watson & Holmes, yet another game that uses those public-domain characters strictly for marketing purposes. It’s not a bad game, though, just a little too simple.

I’m told that Smart Baseball continues to sell well, although the sales figures I get mean nothing to me (since it’s my first book), but it wouldn’t hurt if you bought a dozen more copies to give out for Father’s Day to … um … your twelve fathers. Feel free to sign up for my email newsletter as well.

And now, the links…

I tweeted this one earlier in the week but it’s worth a second boost: Child marriage is still legal in Florida and several other states. As I read the Delaware statute (note: I’m not a lawyer) I think it’s technically legal here too, whereas the author of that op ed is arguing for it to be explicitly banned.
A professor at Evergreen State College has been the target of protests and threats of violence for challenging a campus tradition that, this year, asked white students and faculty to leave campus in a day of forced segregation.
Tasting Table dissects the Philly staple, the roast pork sandwich, including the best of the breed, the version at High Street on Market, with house-made bread and fermented broccoli rabe.
Why is east Africa starving while corn silos in South Africa are overflowing? Because most African countries, including hard-hit Kenya, ban imports of GMO corn. Fear of science is actually killing people.
What is it about Haruki Murakami that mesmerizes people? I found his two best novels, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, to be just that – mesmerizing, like reading your way into a dream-state – but everything before and after those two has left me flat.
The Ringer talked to the four actors who played The Kids in season four of The Wire.
A study published last August found that some cases of ‘untreatable’ depression were tied to metabolic deficiencies and could be treated with supplements, some as common as folate.
Legendary tech writer Walter Mossberg, who spent many years as the technology reviewer-critic for the Wall Street Journal, is retiring and wrote his final column for Recode.
This Atlantic piece from a month ago is the best explanation I’ve found of ESPN’s layoffs and changing business model. Our revenues are driven by cable subscriptions, and as people cut cable, entirely or partially (me), it’s going to reduce the revenues of every cable station. So, no, this isn’t about the white nationalists’ claims that ESPN itself is a leftist entity.
Into the swamp: Jared Kushner used a federal loan program aimed at helping poor, job-starved areas to build a luxury skyscraper.
HHS Secretary Tom Price enriched himself by buying drug stocks and pushing policies to help those companies.
The Administration appointed Nantworks CEO Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong to a health information technology advisory committee. He has a history of rigging donations to fuel the money back to his company and accused media reporting on his company’s revenue troubles of pushing fake news.
Although this Washington Post story purports to discuss fake news coming from within the White House, I think the real message is how supporters of this Administration choose to believe only what they wish to believe. Anonymous sources are fine if they tell you what you wanted to hear; otherwise, they’re “fake news.” You see this with science deniers and conspiracy theorists (people who call themselves “truthers” withou a trace of irony) too.
“Auntie” Maxine Waters has become a hero to the online (so-called) resistance, but they are conveniently forgetting her history of corruption allegations.
How on earth did a prep school teacher work for four schools in six years despite accusations of sexual misconduct at three of them? Rhetorical question, of course: Schools didn’t and still don’t report this stuff to future employers.
The New York Times axed its ‘public editor’ this week and, really, when they run garbage this puff piece on “wellness” charlatan Amanda Chantal Bacon, it’s hard to understand what that person was doing in the first place.
An autistic writer penned this piece in February about the irresponsibility of speculation around whether Barron Trump is on the spectrum. I don’t think such speculation is remotely fair or warranted, but it resurfaced this week with the totally unverifiable story that Barron thought Kathy Griffin’s (offensive) photo of her holding a fake, bloody Trump head was real.
I thought this story about Melania Trump and the wife of the Israeli President was a rare glimpse into the humanity of someone who, fairly or not, is painted as a mere trophy wife.
Oklahoma’s budget crisis has many schools dropping to just four days a week of classes. Both Oklahoma and Kansas are run by far-right Republican Governors who’ve helped drive their states off the fiscal cliff, and who’ve widely expanded publicly-funded charter schools at the apparent expense of traditional public schools.
This seems like a big deal – the FDA just approved the first cancer-fighting drug tied to a specific biomarker in the tumor. Previous cancer drugs were all targeted to a type of cancer – lung, skin, blood – defined by its original location in the body.
I’ll end with this.

For some international perspective on the Paris Accord, this is from Australia's @theage. pic.twitter.com/lAnaxWKT1T

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 2, 2017

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: gmo, links, mental illness, murakami, philadelphia, science, stick to baseball, the swamp, the wire

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