vaccines — Page 12

→ May 11, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/11/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts this week, my first mock draft of 2019 and a draft scouting post on some prospects at Vanderbilt and Louisville. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At Paste, I reviewed Noctiluca, a fun, light, dice-drafting game from the designer of Raiders of the North Sea. My daughter and I have really enjoyed this one.

Before I get to the regular links, here’s a GoFundMe that might be of interest to many of you. Luis Vasquez, a former Mets farmhand, developed bone cancer in his leg last year; he has survived it, but surgery to replace his knee and tibia has probably ended his career. Jen Wolf, who worked with Luis while she was with the Mets the last few years, has set up a GoFundMe page to help Vasquez move into a safer house in the Dominican Republic, as his family’s current home is falling apart and lacks electricity or indoor plumbing.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A prominent case of gang rape in Spain that resulted in the five perpetrators only receiving convictions on lesser charges fueled massive nationwide protests – and into a position of power.
This New Yorker longread from a few weeks ago looks at the drive to automate produce picking, which has implications for the kind of food we eat, when we can buy it, how nutritious it is, and for the demand for unskilled laborers.
VICE explains how AirPods are an environmental tragedy; they’re expensive, don’t last long, and then they’re just trash.
You’ve heard plenty about the Alabama bill that would effectively criminalize abortions in the state; it would also criminalize false rape allegations in a way that if you accuse someone of rape and they’re acquitted, you have then committed a crime. Between this and Georgia’s attempt to ban abortion last week, the American South is no country for women.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Ohio, a state with three big cities and apparently Alabama around them, are pushing a bill to ban private insurance from covering abortions and that might also ban coverage of birth control. Theocracy still has its adherents.
The Daily Beast profiles a Hezbollah sleeper agent busted in the US for selling counterfeit Uggs.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has descended into denialism – and has made it a career. His sister and nephew write about how he’s dangerously wrong on vaccines.
Seth Meyers had Meghan McCain on his show and pushed back on her hypocritical comments against Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Republicans across the country are fighting Democrats’ attempts to tighten vaccination laws across the country, yet another example of the GOP aligning itself with anti-science interests.
The city of San Francisco has subpoenaed a doctor suspected of granting fake medical exemptions to parents seeking to avoid vaccinating their children.
Bioethicist Art Caplan wrote about a framework for legal liability for parents who refuse to vaccinate in a Harvard Law blog post in 2013.
Germany’s health minister proposed fining non-vaccinating parents $2700 to further discourage refusers.
The FDA is moving to increase regulations of supplements, a move that is more than overdue given the size of the market and the potential for harm to consumers by misleading labels and lack of manufacturing standards.
Sexual orientation is fluid into our adult years, supported by yet more research led by Virginia Tech scientist Christine Kaestle.
I’m now very interested in Furious Hours by Casey Cep after reading this review of the book, which covers a possible serial killer and an unwritten book by Harper Lee.
This NPR piece explains how hospitals cope when an unidentifiable patient arrives — someone without ID who isn’t conscious or isn’t able to identify themselves.
Nancy Armour writes about the privilege some Cubs fans have shown when defending Addison Russell or the fan who made a racist gesture on camera, saying those of us with that privilege can’t tell other classes that they shouldn’t be offended.
Why is it news when athletes of color decide not to go to the White House, but it’s not news when white athletes decide to go?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, cost of food, links, longreads, nutrition, stick to baseball, vaccines, women's rights

→ May 5, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/5/19.

I had two ESPN+ posts last week, my ranking of the top 50 prospects in this year’s draft class and a scouting blog post covering a half-dozen top prep players (five of them on the top 50). My first mock draft of 2019 goes up on Monday. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday as well. I’ve been trying to time those to when I’ve got actual content to tell you all about, especially baseball things.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Cut looks at a small cult that operated within the Sarah Lawrence campus, as the father of a student there ended up crashing in her dorm and taking control of many of her roommates’ lives. The university’s reluctance to act is especially disturbing.
BuzzFeed talked to former white nationalist writer/provocateur Katie McHugh, a piece that tries to exonerate her (and fails, in my opinion) but that is instructive into how the alt-right social media machine works.
The Saudi government has regularly helped its citizens living in the U.S. escape prosecution for crimes by spiriting them out of the country, yet we do nothing about this because we continue to believe that the Saudis are our friends despite forty-plus years of evidence that they are not. First it was oil, now it’s help against terrorism, but there’s always an excuse for treating the Saudis as allies even when their actions say otherwise.
My friend Tim Grierson interviewed director/actor Werner Herzog on the eve of the German film giant’s new documentary Meeting Gorbachev.
Kavitha Davidson wrote in the Guardian about sexual assault in sports and society, focusing on Luke Walton’s attorney is trying to use #MeToo to denigrate the coach’s victim.
The New York Times explores eleven major food crops already affected by climate change, which, as the article notes, is widely denied by elected officials (always Republicans) from many of the states that rely on agriculture for employment and income.
The Washington Post profiles D’Arcy Carden, who plays Janet on The Good Place.
The Post also argues that anti-vaxxers should bear the financial costs of their actions when outbreaks occur.
The anti-vaxxer movement is also turning to increasingly violent rhetoric. We ignored this as a society when anti-abortion activists did it, and then when white nationalists did it, and both movements eventually turned to violence and terrorism.
Those same anti-vaxxers are harassing and threatening a Toronto mother whose son died of the flu as she has been advocating for greater use of the flu vaccine.
Measles had been eradicated in this hemisphere in 2000; it just reached its highest level in the U.S. in twenty years, entirely because of anti-vaxxers.
Meanwhile, science-denier Darryl Metcalfe, Pennsylvania’s representative for its 12th district (guess which party!), introduced a bill making it easier for parents to skip vaccinations by requiring doctors to treat unvaccinated children even if it poses risks to other patients.
Germany’s health minister proposed issuing large fines to families who don’t vaccinate their school-aged children. Add that to liability and you might extinguish enough of the deniers to stop these outbreaks.
Indonesia announced a plan to move the capital away from Jakarta because that city is sinking.
The political science valedictorian at Brigham Young University announced during his speech that he’s gay, a huge move given that the Mormon Church just announced a month ago that homosexuality was no longer considered apostasy.
Adam Serwer argues in the Atlantic that Nazis are and have always been trolls.
A National Geographic editorial argues that we must keep half of all land mass in its natural state to stop climate change. That may be true, but, uh, good luck with that.
A federal court ruled that Ohio Republicans violated Ohioans’ constitutional rights with a 2011 gerrymander. I know New Jersey Democrats did this too, but are all of the remaining gerrymanders this decade by Republicans?
Board game news: Plan B Games opened pre-orders for Century: A New World, the third game in Emerson Matsuuchi’s trilogy that also included Spice Road and Eastern Wonders.
Acram Digital announced that they’re developing a digital port of Charterstone, the tremendous legacy game that was my #2 title of 2018.
Asmodee announced the creation of a new fiction imprint to publish works based on or tied to its wide stable of board game and RPG titles.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, links, metoo, rape culture, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 27, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/27/19.

No new ESPN+ content this past week, since the NFL draft sort of took center stage, but I’ll have a fresh draft ranking this upcoming week and my first projection for the MLB draft shortly after, either later this week or at the start of the next. Klawchat will also return this week.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Solenia from Pearl Games, a light strategy title that offers more depth of strategy than most gateway games do without sacrificing playability or making turns too long. I also recently reviewed the app version of the game Castles of Burgundy for Ars Technica.

You may also enjoy more of my words by signing up for my free email newsletter, which I send out when the muse speaks to me.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Sterling Jewelers, which operates most of the major mall jewelry store brands you know (Kay, Belden, Jared, Zales, and others), has allowed a culture of wage discrimination, sexual harassment, and outright assault to flourish even as a lawsuit first filed in 2005 continues to crawl through the courts. This lengthy expose by the New York Times‘ Taffy Brodesser-Akner has many triggering details of rape and sexual assaults, and explains how these problems became endemic to the company across brands and regions.
The New Yorker‘s Jia Tolentino explores what it takes to put your phone away and reduce the time we all waste on our devices.
Vox looks at the rise of the online ‘incel’ community and how it has spawned real-world violence. The worship of mass murderers like Elliott Rodger and Marc Lépine should tell you all you need to know about these atavists.
A new paper in the Hofstra Law Review looks at amateur baseball coaches who overuse their pitchers (PDF), exploring why a lawsuit against an offending coach on behalf of an injured pitcher would be extremely unlikely to succeed and thus arguing for a consistent scheme of pitch count regulations. (The piece mentions me in passing and incorrectly identifies my role with the Blue Jays.)
Also in the New Yorker: the story of a Jewish jazz musician who survived the genocide in part by playing in a jazz band for the Nazis.
The Cut interviewed Eula Biss, the author of On Immunity, about how “anti-vaxxers” are too heterogenous a group to be lumped under that single term. That’s one reason I would prefer that we call them ‘deniers,’ because that is something they all have in common – they deny the incontrovertible evidence that vaccines are safe and effective, even though they have diverse rationalizations for doing so.
The United States worked to dilute a UN resolution against the use of rape in war. You read that right: The UN tried to condemn rape as a war crime, and the U.S. fought to water it down.
Several women at Google have accused the company of retaliating against them for organizing a walkout to protest the company’s poor treatment of women.
NPR looks back at the immediate, effusive reaction when Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which became an anthem for disaffected youth of its time despite lyrical content that itself is anti-anthemic.
A 30-year-old man came down with measles … which is how he learned he wasn’t vaccinated. I would never speak to my parents again if I found out they had skipped vaccinating me. (I’ve seen my records, so I know this isn’t the case.)
Meanwhile, measles cases in the U.S. have spiked to nearly 700, even though the disease was eliminated from our hemisphere in 2000. This is entirely the fault of vaccine deniers, and they should be forced to bear the cost of their decisions.
A New York Supreme Court Judge rejected a challenge to a city vaccine mandate, which is good news, if temporary, in the fight against measles. One of the lawyers who brought the challenge? Conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Washington State Representative Matt Shea (guess) was caught discussing violent attacks with far-right figures, according to a Guardian investigation. The Seattle Times‘ editorial board has called for the state GOP to oust him.
A cognitive scientist explains why we are so susceptible to fake news and distorted memories. I definitely thought the Evil Queen’s quote was “Mirror, mirror, on the wall.”
Several Ohio lawmakers (guess) are pushing legislation in response to a mother who let her 9-year-old son dance in drag at a local bar, in a transparent attack on LGBTQ children.
Chely Wright responded to the bigot Franklin Graham’s claims that you can’t be gay and Christian.
President Trump continues to defend white nationalists and the slave-owning general Robert E. Lee in response to attacks from Joe Biden over the very issue of Trump’s support of white nationalism.
McSweeney’s gives us a rough transcript of every interview with Pete Buttigieg.
Bosk, the new game from the co-designer of Sagrada, is available for pre-order on Floodgate’s site.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 13, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/13/19.

I’ve had four ESPN+ posts this week. On the draft blog, I covered last week’s NHSI tournament + Elon RHP George Kirby, then scouted West Virginia RHP Alek Manoah and Texas Tech 3b Josh Jung. I’ve heard Jung’s name pronounced a few ways, but I think it has to be either Josh Jung or Yosh Yung, for consistency’s sake. On the pro side, I looked at the most prospect-laden minor league rosters this year, and finally saw Luis Robert play against the Royals’ high-A squad. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Architects of the West Kingdom, the newest game from Shem Phillips, who got a Spiel nomination for 2015’s Raiders of the North Sea. Architects is a busy worker-placement game, but has a few fun quirks like capturing your opponents’ meeples and selling them to the prison, or trading reputation to steal tax money or go to the black market.

And now, the links:

Longreads first: Anne Boyer writes in the New Yorker about what cancer takes away from you even if you survive it.
Adjunct professors are the minor-league baseball players of academia: overworked, underpaid, and often living on the edge of poverty. The Atlantic looks at one such adjunct who died because she couldn’t afford basic medical care that might have saved her.
Hampshire College has long had a reputation as a ‘hippie’ school, loose on the academics, maybe heavy on the substances. The college may be on the verge of extinction as it seeks a partner or buyer.
Forbes looks at deadbeat billionaire Jim Justice, the current governor of West Virginia, a man who doesn’t pay his bills and ignores state regulations that don’t suit him.
I’ve written quite a bit here about antibiotic resistance and the need for aggressive, science-based policies to combat it. Well, fungi can also make us sick, and now Candida auris has evolved resistance to antifungal drugs, too – and it’s hard to kill even outside the body. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06), an engineer by training, had a tweet thread about this topic after the article ran. Guess her party.
Kyle Korver, who sources tell me is a professional basketball player, wrote in The Player’s Tribune about learning to understand his own privilege.
Isaac Chotiner interviewed writer Bret Easton Ellis for the New Yorker, and Ellis said some things that didn’t play particularly well online, for good reason. I’m not linking this to dunk on Ellis, but to praise Chotiner: Look at how consistently he probes when Ellis dissembles, and how he refuses to let Ellis off the hook for saying something wrong. This is how the media should interview people in power.
ScienceNews has a follow-up piece to a link I posted last week that profiled fossil hunter Robert DePalma and the possible discovery of a fossil record from immediately after the Chicxulub impact.
Chik-Fil-A continues to pour money into nonprofit groups fighting LGBT rights across the country. I haven’t set foot in one of their restaurants in at least a decade, for this precise reason, but J. Kenji Lopez-Alt shows you how to recreate their famous chicken sandwich at home.
WIRED explains why the robocall problem will never truly be fixed.
Elizabeth Warren may not be faring well in early polls or fundraising, but Moira Donegan writes in the Guardian that Warren is the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic Party, producing practical policy proposals where others purvey platitudes.
This week’s Hidden Brain podcast episode looks at how societal views of gay rights changed so dramatically inside of fifty years.
Stand your white ground: An Alabama woman who shot and killed the man who violently raped her and then assaulted her brother is now facing life in prison. Don’t get mad when people stereotype the south while this shit still happens in your backyard.
In Missouri, two legislators – guess which party! – are pushing anti-vaccine bills and conspiracy theories.
Another WIRED piece argues that our health laws have failed the public good when it comes to vaccines, making it too easy for idiots and the ignorant to opt out.
Amidst the furor over US-Israeli relations, we’re losing track of the various despots Trump is propping up around the world, including the rising dictatorship in Egypt.
Why am I including a link to a press release about a single-malt whiskey’s launch in India? You’ll see if you read it.
The New York Times crossword puzzle Twitter account got into a bizarre beef with another twitterer over what was pretty obviously a joke.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, gay rights, links, missouri, science, vaccines, west virginia

→ April 6, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/6/19.

No ESPN+ content from me this week, although I have a draft blog post to file tonight that will cover what I saw at NHSI this week as well as potential first-rounder George Kirby of Elon. I did hold a Klawchat on Tuesday.

Meredith Wills helped me do some of the research that went into Smart Baseball, and, in addition to being an astrophysicist and general baseball expert (who realized that a change in the thickness of the baseball’s laces likely explains the current home run surge), she’s also a knitter and generally quite crafty. She’s disassembled many baseballs to look into their construction and is now selling crafts made from the leather on these baseballs, repurposing material that would otherwise go to landfills.

And now, the links, with a note. I didn’t get through all the longer reads I’d saved this week, so I may post a bonus roundup tomorrow or Monday. We’ll see how my weekend goes.

The best thing I read this week, one with particular relevance to me and many people close to me, is the New Yorker‘s piece on Laura Delano and the poorly-understood challenges of going off psychiatric drugs. I take one of those drugs, escitalopram (Lexapro), at the lowest ‘therapeutic dose’ of 10 mg/day, to help manage my anxiety.
Irin Carmon, now of New York magazine’s Intelligencer, writes of how the Washington Post, including famed editor-in-chief Marty Baron, spiked her work (with Amy Brittain) revealing that 60 Minutes boss Jeff Fager had a history of sexual harassment. CBS and Fager barraged the Post with threats of lawsuits and implied that they’d leak information to sink the story and some individuals’ careers, so the Post excised Fager’s story from their exposé of Charlie Rose; Ronan Farrow eventually published these allegations last July, leading to Fager’s belated firing.
The BBC looks at the murder of Iraqi Instagram star Tara Fares, part of what appears to be an increasing campaign to silence “liberal” women with significant social media profiles in the country.
Two of the links this week are very difficult reads about the deaths of children. The Washington Post goes deeper on the story of the grieving mother Susan Stevens, whose daughter’s death by overdose been used by Trump as ‘evidence’ we need a border wall, but whose story is far more complicated, with abuse and sexual assault possibly contributing to her daughter’s drug use.
The second is a photo essay on NPR covering the life and death of 12-year-old Lola Muñoz from a brain tumor, documented by photojournalist Moriah Ratner, who spent over a year with Lola and became very close to her subject before Lola’s death one year ago.
Vox asked fifteen experts about what modern practices or beliefs will be “unthinkable” in fifty years; I thought Lux Alptraum’s answer on sex work and its possible decriminalization was particularly insightful. When we turn sex workers into criminals, we are often revictimizing the people we charge with crimes.
The Anti-Defamation League called out anti-vaxxers for misappropriating the Holocaust-era Star of David badge to try to make themselves into some sort of victims.
The HPV vaccine has led to a dramatic drop in cervical disease, referring to the precancerous cells found in cervixes as a result of HPV infections.
I may have included this once before, but Undark’s profile of 18-year-old Ethan Lindberger, who was unvaccinated until he gained his majority and whose mother is still off in cloudcuckooland when it comes to vaccines, is worth your time.
From McSweeney’s: “I’m Vaccinating my Child the Natural Way – With Measles.“
The Administration is draining that swamp by letting pork producers have more control over inspections. Getting food-borne illnesses to own the libs?
Texas billionaire and Trump ally Andrew Beal is trying to get courts and regulators to stop California’s clean energy goals so he can profit, with zero apparent concern for the effects on our environment. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be born without a soul.
The Fifth Circuit Court’s recent ruling in Gibson v. Collier abandons the rule of law so the majority could weigh in against trans rights, according to plaintiff’s attorney Max Kennerly.
Probiotics do little to nothing for your overall health; they may even be bad for your immune system. Want a healthier gut? Eat more fiber.
The Atlantic has a fun interview with songwriters Norm Stiles and Chris Cerf, who wrote many of Sesame Street‘s most famous songs and later co-created Between the Lions. I do dispute the writer’s assertion that Sesame Street‘s best-known tune is “Put Down the Duckie.” That’s not even the show’s best-known song about a rubber duck; “Rubber Ducky” was so popular it hit the top 20 on Billboard‘s pop singles cart in 1970.
In a video essay for the New York Times Venezuelan-American writer Joanna Hausmann says the American Left is wrong to glorify Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro, and that protests against U.S. action in the collapsed South American state seem to ignore the wishes of actual Venezuelans. She also points out that Venezuela’s economy collapsed due to decades of corruption, with Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez looting the state for personal gain.
BuzzFeed writers have unionized, but the company is refusing to even recognize the union. You can see the union’s open letter to management on its Twitter feed.
Political science professor Leah Stokes looks at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that corporate money, not public opinion, is the real opposition to the Green New Deal, and finds evidence to support it.
Wine Enthusiast has a guide to amari, potable bitters, mostly from Italy that I’m seeing more on dessert menus at fine restaurants. The piece mentions my two favorites for drinking straight – Meletti and Montenegro.
Nationals pitching prospect Sterling Sharp is running a pledge drive to benefit youth baseball in Detroit where you can donate a flat amount or do as I did, pinning your donation to the number of groundball outs Sharp records this year.
Renegade Game Studios announced pre-orders for two upcoming titles, Artsee and the trick-taking game Time Chase.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, depression, food safety, links, liquor, longreads, mental health, the swamp, vaccines

→ March 30, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/30/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers, I posted my second Cactus League scouting notebook, covering prospects from Cleveland, the Giants, the A’s, the White Sox, the Cubs, and the Padres; my first scouting notebook from Arizona went up the previous week. I also posted a draft scouting post that looked at four of the top college position players in the draft class, including Adley Rutschman and Andrew Vaughn, the top two players on my first draft board. I also wrote up my predictions for this year’s standings, playoff outcomes, and postseason award winners, which has already upset Yankee fans (who cares, my picks don’t affect anything) and had one Mariner fan trying to told-you-so me because they’ve scored a lot of runs through (checks notes) four games.

At Paste, I gave the first perfect score (10/10) I’ve given to any board game in the 100+ reviews I’ve written for them in the last five years, awarding the honor to Wingspan, an incredible, smart, beautiful, and scientifically accurate new game from Elizabeth Hargrave that, coincidentally, is one of the only games I know that was designed and illustrated entirely by women. It’s so well-designed, yet easy to learn and doesn’t take that long to play once you understand a few basic mechanics. The game has sold out its first two print runs but the next one is expected in early May.

I didn’t chat this week for a few reasons, and am behind on my email newsletter for the same, but hope to pick all of that back up in the next few days. I appreciate your patience. That sounds ominous but they’re mostly good things that have simply demanded more of my time.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is from February, but this New York/The Cut longread on the rise and fall of Tulum, Mexico as a vacation destination is fascinating, and a lesson in how some of the ills of western prosperity are causing environmental destruction and economic harm in the developing world.
The surgeon who writes and tweets as Doc Bastard has compiled a list of rebuttals to 73 common anti-vaxxer claims, including some I’d never seen before.
Mother Jones looks at how crowdfunding has made catastrophic medical care into an online popularity contest.
Alex Jones is being sued – I hope into oblivion – by parents of victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, and in his deposition he claimed he had a “psychosis” that led him to say Sandy Hook was a staged, false-flag operation, and frequently denied saying or doing things he actually did.
Nevada Lt. Governor Lucy Flores details getting an unwanted kiss from then-VP Joe Biden in 2014. I have zero interest in a Biden candidacy for President anyway, but I hope this finally ends it.
The New Yorker‘s Helen Rosner describes Julia Child’s commitment to progressive politics, which became more public as her profile grew.
Ginny Searle, writing for Deadspin, takes a critical look at the increasingly fan-unfriendly policies implemented across MLB, often with the outright complicity of media shills like Darren Rovell.
The Economist tweeted and then deleted a teaser that asked, rhetorically, if trans people should be sterilized. The Daily Dot examines the transphobic history of editor Helen Joyce, arguing that this was far from an isolated or accidental incident.
The NRA had quite a week: They fought against renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, arguing that domestic abusers shouldn’t lose their rights to own guns, and then a Huffington Post investigation revealed that NRA executive Mark Richardson solicited a Sandy Hook hoaxer, asking him to do the same for the Parkland mass shooting.
The Atlantic describes the chytrid fungus Bd, responsible for the decline or extinction of over 500 amphibian species, making it the deadliest pathogen in recorded history.
My friend Adnan Virk is starting a great new gig at DAZN, co-anchoring their nightly whip-around baseball show. He spoke to the Washington Post‘s Ben Strauss about his new job and how ESPN treated him, up to his firing in February.
NPR profiles Bob’s Red Mill, especially how it became a force in gluten-free products. I counted three Bob’s bags in my pantry just now, and need to pick up two more items – their GF flour mix and their almond flour – today. Their products are great for any bakers, since they’re often the only source of things like tapioca or potato starch, both superior to corn starch for hot fruit pies, Mike.
The CDC helped fund the development of a drug that can prevent HIV transmission even during unprotected sex, so why is a private company reaping all the profits and pricing it as a monopolist?
A California GOP delegate appointed a white nationalist to an ‘associate’ delegate position, and seems rather pleased with himself.
An African-American attorney in Maryland says he was detained in a Harford County courthouse because the deputy thought he was pretending to be a lawyer.
Here’s this week’s roundup of vaccine news and anti-vaxxer madness. Maryn McKenna, writing for WIRED, looks at the real costs to society of the anti-vaxxer movement. We all pay more for health insurance because of these idiots.
VICE‘s Joseph Cox says Instagram’s algorithm pushed him into an anti-vaccine ‘rabbit hole’ within ten seconds of him following one prominent denialist account.
Maine’s rate of pertussis infections is eight times the national average because of Mainers’ higher than normal rate of refusing vaccines.
I’ve included a few links recently on California doctors selling questionable or outright fraudulent ‘medical exemptions’ to the state’s tight vaccination laws; now Dr. Richard Pan, a state Senator there, has introduced new legislation targeting such doctors, who put personal profits over the good of the community.
New York’s Rockland County has declared a state of emergency due to a massive measles outbreak caused by anti-vaxxers, with over 150 reported cases of the highly contagious, dangerous disease. Prof. Peter Hotez, writing for the BMJ‘s opinion blog, calls the outbreak nightmarish, especially how anti-vaxxers targeted orthodox Jews with their messaging. This is an increasing problem – anti-vaxxers find vulnerable groups and bombard them with bullshit, but face no consequences when outbreaks occur.
Someone ran around Cook County (Chicago) with the measles, sparking a warning to the public of possible exposure at fifteen different locations over the past week. I hope this person is held accountable for the costs of their actions, but I doubt it.
There’s a mumps outbreak near me in Philly, spurring officials at Temple University, where the outbreak is centered, to give students booster shots to try to counter the waning immunity teenagers seem to experience from that specific vaccine.
Deadspin’s Albert Burnenko asks Which Online Edgelord Mishaps Will Derail Trevor Bauer’s Season?.
Oceans, a new standalone game with similar mechanics to its parent game, Evolution, is now on Kickstarter; I demoed this at PAX Unplugged in December and found there were some aspects I preferred, especially the mechanics around feeding.
Dire Wolf’s upcoming Game of Thrones: Oathbreaker social deduction game is now available for pre-order.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, Cooking, environment, gluten-free, guns, health, hoaxes, metoo, mexico, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 23, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/23/19.

I had two ESPN+ pieces this week – my annual breakouts column and my first scouting notebook from Arizona, covering prospects from the Padres, Dbacks, A’s, and Royals. I’ll have a draft blog post up this weekend looking at four potential first-rounders, including presumptive #1 overall pick (today, at least) Adley Rutschman. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

There will be a fresh email newsletter in the next 2-3 days as well. You can sign up free and never miss a word.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Republic looks at the nihilist governing philosophy of Mitch McConnell and how it has broken our federal government for decades to come.
Our diet has declined in quality as it has increased in quantity, and the results are killing us, literally, according to the Guardian’s The Way We Eat Now column.
The California Sun has a great profile of Olympic ski jumper Elizabeth Swaney, who was excoriated last year for her performance at Sochi and the unusual way she qualified.
We should be eating a lot more fiber, and a lot of different kinds of it. I exceed the daily recommendation when I’m home, eating homemade granola (with oats, almonds, coconut, and pepitas) with yogurt every day for lunch and usually getting plants into my dinner every night.
An Oregon pediatrician with over 15,000 patients claims vaccines cause autism and has said he would rather his grandchildren not be vaccinated. This has to become cause for loss of your medical license in every state. With Oregon in the grip of a measles outbreak, state Republicans are rallying around the bullshit argument of “vaccine choice,” because the GOP hasn’t met an anti-science position it won’t adopt.
Marie Claire has a piece on the perils of sharing your name with an infamous person … by a writer named Elizabeth Holmes.
The great Jasper Fforde writes about how living in Wales influenced his latest book, the novel Early Riser.
Pete Buttigeig’s interview in the Washington Post is too short but shows why he’s sort of come out of nowhere to capture some early support; his answers are thoughtful and on the issues he discusses he mostly lines up with my personal positions, at least.
Expiration dates are a myth, and public reliance on them is a major cause of food waste. My test: use your eyes and your nose. You’ll know if food is spoiled.
One San Diego pediatrician is responsible for a third of all “medical exemptions” in the city, because, it appears, she’s realized she can gain patients by doing so – even though she’s granting them for bogus reasons.
A Kentucky student who refuses to get vaccinated against chicken pox (because of a bogus belief about the vaccine) is suing to be allowed to play basketball, since he obviously thinks his “right’ to play supersedes other students’ rights to not get chicken pox. Kentucky’s governor didn’t help matters this week, of course.
GoFundMe will no longer allow anti-vaxxers to raise funds on its site. Although this is just one outlet and the direct impact may be small, the more major sites do this the better chance we have that others – including Twitter, still a holdout in clamping down on denialists – will follow suit.
Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook have been mobilizing to spam doctors’ pages with fraudulent information and even threats against the physicians, so some physicians find themselves unwilling to speak out about vaccines or even reach out to patients to let them know when flu shots are available.
After one such coordinated attack on the public pages of a Pittsburgh pediatrician’s office, researchers examined the comments to find common factors among the trolls – and found that the attacks were coordinated from inside those closed anti-vaccine groups on Facebook.
Dr. Paul Offit, inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, explains the mumps outbreak at Tufts and why herd immunity matters in a 13-minute audio interview with WHYY.
The Globe & Mail’s editorial page is just the latest to argue that the media needs to stop providing false balance by listening to anti-vaxxers, who rely on debunked ‘studies’ and refuse to debate in good faith.
These so-called “fetal heartbeat” bills are medically illiterate, and the press needs to catch on and call them fetal pole cardiac activity bills, because that’s what tests are actually detecting, not a heartbeat.
For The Athletic subscribers, this piece on wearable technology is a good introduction to the topic, although I think it leaves a few key questions unaddressed, and I have an issue with the use of “genetic” here to describe physical characteristics (nobody is checking players’ genes, at least not that I know of).
There’s a new Kickstarter up for an expansion to Valeria: Card Kingdoms, a dice-rolling tableau builder, which also includes a new standalone title within the Valeria family of games.
There’s also a Kickstarter up for a new campaign for the RPG Symbaroum.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: kickstarters, longreads, nutrition, vaccines

→ March 9, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/9/19.

No new ESPN+ content this week, but that will change now that I’m in Florida to see a little spring training and at least two potential first-rounders while I’m here. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday and a Periscope video chat on Friday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, this time discussing a hypothesis I have on how some teams handle low-ceiling teenaged prospects; you can sign up here and maybe I’ll send you something too.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: I have four pieces in this week’s roundup from the New Yorker, including two longreads. I subscribe to their site – I signed up right after I cancelled my New York Times subscription – and, if you have the disposable income, I recommend it. The first is Jane Mayer’s incredible, horrifying piece on the transformation of Fox News into a Trump propaganda network, the closest thing we’ve ever had to state TV in this country.
The second longread profiles kaiseki chef Niki Nakayama, a pioneer here in a niche cuisine dominated by men.
Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur received a large file of thousands of scouting reports from the Cincinnati Reds from 1991 to 2003 and wrote up some of what they found from global analysis and looking at specific players in a three-part series. I’m quoted several times in the first piece, but I will mention again that I’m a little uncomfortable with this information, which is outdated but would still be classified as trade secrets, getting out to the public.
The Verge looks at popular Twitter user & activist Dr. Eugene Gu, who has been accused of sexual assault and of misrepresenting portions of his resume.
There’s been a lot of very bad writing in the last week over Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and her comments on Israel and AIPAC. I thought this Politico piece contrasting Omar’s place on the policy continuum with that of fellow Rep. Dean Phillips, who represents a district that borders on Omar’s, was one of the few good pieces. Omar ended up in the news again for her candid comments on President Obama’s tenure, including his decision to continue the drone strike program started by his predecessor, and for her comments that questioned whether some people have “allegiance” to Israel, the latter being taken completely out of context and used as more evidence of anti-Semitism. It’s not, as you can see from this transcript of her remarks. AIPAC is a powerful lobbying group, and AIPAC is not Israel is not Judaism.
A Florida massage parlor owner has been selling access to President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. I’m not sure how this isn’t a bigger story.
The framing here isn’t great but this New Yorker piece on the risk that we become so overwhelmed by climate change’s dangers that we give up is still worth a read. I haven’t run into this sentiment anywhere online or in the real world, at least not yet.
The New Yorker‘s Masha Green looks at why measles is “a quintessential political issue” of 2019, drawing parallels to Michael Cohen’s testimony while excoriating our public-health system.
Dorit Reiss writes in the San Francisco Chronicle that non-vaccinating parents should be liable for damages when their kids start outbreaks. This would put a stop to some vaccine refusals – plenty of wealthy or high-income parents are vaccine deniers, too – but even marginal increases in vaccination rates will boost herd immunity.
For example, many of you already saw the story of an Oregon boy, aged 6, who nearly died of tetanus and racked up about $1 million in hospital bills. One, the parents should lose custody; they subjected their son to an entirely preventable, prolonged period of physical suffering. (It’s described in detail in the article. Imagine putting your kid through that.) Two, those costs, which don’t include the opportunity costs of that helicopter or the associated doctors being unable to take care of other patients, are the result of the parents’ active decision not to vaccinate. They should be liable for all of it.
A Chicago man who wasn’t vaccinated as a kid, then caught measles at age 30 and nearly died from it says parents have “no excuse” for deciding not to vaccinate.
UK Health Minister Simon Harris has warned social media companies over anti-vaccine ads ($).
The Sackler family’s role in fueling the opioid epidemic to further enrich themselves represents a significant policy failure, according to the Washington Post‘s Charles Lane.
It looks like Big Tobacco and now its partners in the vaping world may have helped push FDA head Scott Gottlieb out of his job. He was a rarity in this Administration, an official who took a tough stance on regulating harmful products in the name of the public interest.
The era of easy recycling is over as China is no longer interested in our recyclables. Add this to your Green New Deal proposals: we need more reduction and reuse, and easier access to composting. I have had a working compost pile for five years now, and it makes a noticeable difference in reducing my trash, but even that isn’t enough to take all of my compostable plant-based items, and I can’t compost meat or dairy scraps or even most paper materials in there because it’s not big enough. (I have composted a few cotton shirts, though.)
Writer/producer Amy Berg posted a Twitter thread explaining the Writers Guild of America’s conflict-of-interest complaint that the major talent agencies representing them, which could lead to some pretty drastic action as soon as the end of this month. (Full disclosure: I am represented by WME.)
Steven Spielberg wants to ruin the Oscars out of spite. Well, the Oscars aren’t so hot anyway, but he wants to make them worse by ensuring that Netflix titles and, as a secondary consequence, other indie films have a harder time qualifying for the awards. Spielberg went on to yell at several clouds that he said looked too much like the amazon logo.
Drew Magary – back from the brink – goes goes General Sherman on Barstool Sports in the wake of the latter’s aggressive legal tactics to try to get away with copyright infringement.
Jane Coaston explains right-wing grifter Jacob Wohl, recently banned from Twitter for admitting he’s made and continues to make fake accounts to try to influence elections and/or get gullible conservatives to send him money.
Parker Molloy shows how conservative outlets and commentators use “Mister Gotcha”-like claims of hypocrisy against Democratic politicians or candidates to derail actual debate over policies.
An Alabama court ruled that an aborted fetus’s biological father had some say in whether the pregnancy was terminated while ruling the fetus had legal standing to sue, a huge step backwards for women’s rights and for secularism.
This video clip from INSIDER explains why white savior movies are bad for Hollywood and for viewers.
A new, deluxe edition of the Martin Wallace classic Age of Steam is now up on Kickstarter. The new version includes brand-new artwork and a better color scheme.
A roll-and-write version of the great tile-laying game Lanterns called Lanterns: Dice in the Sky is available for pre-order, with May delivery expected.
Game designer Rich Gain, who worked as an operations manager at Japanime Games until just a few months ago, lost his fiancée and infant son in a car accident last week; there’s a GoFundMe running on his behalf in the wake of the tragedy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board games, japanese cuisine, links, oscars, social media, the swamp, vaccines

→ March 2, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/2/19.

For ESPN+ subscribers this week, I wrote three pieces, breaking down the Bryce Harper deal, ranking the top 30 prospects for this year’s draft, and offering scouting notes on players I saw in Texas, including Bobby Witt, Jr. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

On the gaming front, I reviewed the Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game The Quacks of Quedlinburg for Paste, and also reviewed the digital port of the game Evolution for Ars Technica.

I went on the Mighty 1090 in San Diego with Darren Smith to talk Manny Machado, Olive Garden, and the Oscars, and on TSN 1050 in Toronto to talk about Ross Atkins’ strange comments on Vlad Jr.. I also spoke to True Blue LA about Dodgers prospects, and joined the Sox Machine podcast to talk White Sox prospects.

I’m due for the next edition of my free email newsletter, so sign up now while the gettin’s good.

High Street on Market’s Sandwich Battles begin this Monday, with tickets available for $25. They’re my #1 restaurant in Philly, in large part because their breads are otherworldly.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: GQ has a length profile of the prolific and highly disturbed art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, who stole artworks valued at over $1 billion but never sold anything.
21st Century Fox was hit with a $179 million penalty by an arbitrator over a wide scheme to defraud the actors and producers of Bones of residuals from streaming on Hulu. Fox lied about the profits they were receiving from Hulu, of which Fox owns 30%, and at one point a Fox executive signed both sides of a deal between the two companies.
MLB.com’s Mike Petriello, who was a huge help to me when I was working on Smart Baseball, has a superb primer up on the Rapsodo and Edgetronic devices that are revolutionizing player development, especially in the area of ‘pitch design,’ where coaches and pitchers can work together to change or develop pitches by using real-time data that show how changes in grips or release points affect a pitch’s velocity and spin. Driveline Baseball, mentioned in Mike’s piece, has a blog post up on gaze research, or tracking how hitters see the ball. Technology has allowed teams and players to measure things that were either estimated by scouts/coaches in the past or that were simply brushed off as unmeasurable.
Little Falls, Minnesota, has found success in fighting opioid addiction by treating it as a disease, rather than as a crime or a personal failing. It’s an approach that has worked in other countries – Portugal is a paragon in this area – but goes against the Puritanical strain in American culture that sees addicts as degenerates.
What if climate change leads to enough cloud loss to further accelerate the warming of the planet? The odds of this are higher than we previously realized.
Why is California’s Attorney General refusing to release a list of cops convicted of crimes? Xavier Becerra, running for re-election this year, has even rejected public records requests from his own agency, which has led to lawsuits and would appear to violate open-records laws.
Marcela García writes in the Boston Globe how the should-have-won-Best Picture film Roma has exposed the deep racism within Mexican society.
A popular talking point among Republicans right now is that doctors are “killing babies” right after they’re born. The President said it in his State of the Union address, and it’s been repeated ad nauseam over the last month. Dr. Jen Gunter, an OBGYN who herself gave birth to a son so premature he could not survive, points out what a dangerous lie this line is.
Anti-vaxxer Forest Maready, who likes to depict people with autism as “tragedies,” has a new book coming out that resurfaces the debunked myth that vaccines cause autism. Amazon and Apple are planning to sell it, but I signed this petition asking them to pull the title from their stores. Meanwhile, an inquiry from Rep. Adam Schiff led amazon to pull six anti-vaccination “documentaries” from prime video.
Anti-vaxxer groups on Facebook are harassing pro-vaccine doctors by trashing their Yelp and Google ratings as well as flooding those doctors’ Facebook posts with comments. Facebook has done little to nothing to combat the problem. The Atlantic points out that the Facebook anti-vax community is quite small, just loud, and banning them would be easy for the platform.
WIRED argues that amazon’s anti-vaxxer problem is worse than Facebook’s.
A Nova Scotia chiropractor lost her license for spreading anti-vaccine information and making other unfounded claims. We should strive for the same kinds of laws around chiropractors, naturopaths, and even the rare medical doctor who embraces this sort of bullshit.
CNN also weighed in on tech outlets failing to police the anti-vaxx bullshit on their platforms.
The Washington Post looks at how anti-vaxxers are responding to the overdue public backlash against their efforts, as well as bills in various state legislatures to end religious and/or philosophical exemptions to mandatory vaccination requirements.
Scientific American presents public policies we can use to fight anti-vaxxer lunacy.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Kevin McDermott asks why so many Americans are rejecting science in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
Italian researchers used CRISPR to create a genetically modified version of a malaria-carrying mosquito; if released, it should lead to collapses of that specific species and thus reduce malaria transmissions.
Paste‘s Jacob Weindling noticed that CNN stacked its phony ‘town hall’ for Bernie Sanders with political operatives/lobbyists posing as regular folks.
LA Times movie critic Justin Chang wrote that Green Book is the worst Best Picture winner since Crash, calling the vapid white-savior film “an embarrassment,” “insultingly glib and hucksterish,” “a self-satisfied crock,” and a “palatable brand of godawful.”
Late Night with Seth Meyers rather perfectly sent up the film with their ‘trailer’ for White Savior.
And apparently Green Book producer sent critic Jenni Miller a condescending, tone-deaf email where he doesn’t even know the main character’s real name.
In a bit of things coming full circle, Pig Destroyer’s John Jarvis has formed a new baseball-themed grindcore band, Kolten Wong City, a name that alludes to Kowloon Walled City, whose bassist, Ian Miller, is part of baseball-themed grindcore band Puig Destroyer, whose name alludes to … well, you get it now.
Why are progressive artists still working with Morrissey despite his embrace of far-right causes and outright racist statements?
Talk Talk’s singer and main songwriter Mark Hollis died this week at age 64. His last release was a solo album in 1998, after which he retired from music to spend time with his family.
Splinter writer Samer Kalaf released an email exchange he had with conservative NY Times writer Bret Stephens, without Stephens’ permission, but I think Kalaf comes off far worse here than he realizes.
Roland’s Market, a collaboration between Chris Bianco and the couple behind Tacos Chiwas, closed without warning last month. The location will be converted into a larger outpost of Bianco’s Pane Bianco.
The former editor of the Rocky Mountain News writes of his fear that local journalism will continue to fade and die as newspapers are plundered by hedge-fund owners.
Charlotte Riley describes the game Patriarchy Chicken in a column subtitled “why I refuse to move out of the way for men.”
The FTC is finally cracking down on scammers who buy fake reviews on amazon, going after the seller of a bogus weight-loss ‘supplement.’
In board game news, Disney’s Villainous: Wicked to the Core hits Target tomorrow; it’s exclusive there for a month and will later roll out to other outlets. I’ve played it, and it’s as good as the original, but with rules that are much clearer for first-time players, enough that you might do better to start with this before going back to the first game. (This is a standalone expansion that you can combine with the original.)
Renegade Game Studios has Hex Roller, a new roll-and-write game that I haven’t seen yet, up for preorder.
Days of Wonder announced a few weeks ago that their next title will be Corinth, an update/retheme of the game Yspahan that alters some core rules and eliminates the caravan (which was a dominant strategy in Yspahan).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 movies, addiction, anti-science, art, baseball, board games, california, climate change, frauds, links, movies, oscars, pseudoscience, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ February 23, 2019
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/23/19.

Just one ESPN+ piece this week, looking at the Padres’ deal with Manny Machado. I held a Klawchat on Friday since my afternoon game in Texas was rained out.

I sent out the latest issue of my free email newsletter this week, complete with Obscure Music Reference as the subject. I nearly always tailor those song quotes to the subject of the email, although I think this week’s might have been a bit too obscure.

For the next five Mondays, High Street on Market, my #1 restaurant in Philadelphia, will host “sandwich battles” in the evenings, featuring area chefs and personalities in a competition to build the best sandwich using High Street’s phenomenal artisan breads and a mystery ingredient each week. Tickets are $25 apiece and you might see me in the crowd one night.

And now, the links…

The chefs from Montreal’s acclaimed restaurant Joe Beef discuss their kitchen’s culture of excess and the process of getting sober, and how that changed the whole restaurant. I thought it was interesting that people in rehab are told to avoid working in food service, since there’s booze everywhere.
The gaming world has moved quickly to banish writer Zak Smith after multiple women accused him of assault/abuse, including his ex-wife. Gen Con, the tabletop convention I attend every August and where I spoke on writers’ panels the last two years, has canceled his planned appearance and fully banned him from the con.
I generally find those “stop using your phone!” guides and self-help articles to be both patronizing and unrealistic; I use my phone more than I should, or want to, yet using it 75% less or not using it at all is impractical. That said, this New York Times piece on the topic is actually helpful and acknowledges that the same devices that distract us also provide essential services to us in life and at work.
A viral video of a white Delaware police officer pulling his gun on a black motorist has sparked controversy and calls for the officer to be disciplined or fired. I haven’t seen any more than that video but thought this was interesting – a lawyer who’s sued the Delaware State Police before in other cases argues that the officer may have been overzealous but wasn’t wrong to draw his weapon. The Attorney General’s office has said they are not investigating the case right now.
Vanderbilt has denied tenure to a neurology professor who spoke out against a professor who was later put on leave after he was accused of drugging and raping a student. If you believe such things matter – I’m not sure they do – you can sign a petition urging Vanderbilt to reconsider.
Measles, that “benign childhood disease,” has killed over 900 in Madagascar in an ongoing epidemic.
A British Columbia measles outbreak started because one idiot father took his three unvaccinated sons to southeast Asia, where they caught the virus and then brought it home. He gives the bullshit autism story as his explanation, just one more reason Andrew Wakefield should be denied the right to even enter the United States or Canada by our respective governments. He’s a terrorist.
Facebook lets advertisers, including anti-vaccine groups, target users interested in “vaccine controversies,” according to a Guardian report. BuzzFeed also reported on how one anti-vax community built its following on Facebook. Cool cool cool.
The Charlotte Observer‘s editorial board writes that North Carolina needs to crack down on vaccine-denier parents.
This New York Times piece on a couple of bibliophiles who connected over their shared love of books … except that, for reasons the author sort of explains, she’d almost totally stopped reading when they met.
There’s a GoFundMe with an explanation worth reading for the abused ex-wife of David Sorensen, who is now suing her for defamation (but not the Washington Post, which printed the story, since they have the resources to fight back).
Is ‘Oumuamua actually material from a nearby, newly formed star? That seems more plausible than the claim that it was some sort of real-life Rama.
The Inspector General is investigating FCC Chairman Ajit Pai for improper conduct in pushing for Sinclair’s takeover of Tribune Media’s local TV assets.
The News & Observer published a timeline of the investigation into fraud in NC-9, where the Republican candidate seems to have suddenly remembered having two strokes that harmed his memory.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, delaware, links, metoo, north carolina, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

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