vaccines — Page 16

→ August 25, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/25/18.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

→ August 18, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/18/18.

My biggest piece this week was my annual Gen Con wrap-up for Paste, covering the 20 best games I got to play, demo, or just watch at the convention, and discussing pretty much everything else I saw too.

For Insiders, I wrote up what Shane Baz’s inclusion means for the Chris Archer trade, with scouting notes on Adam Haseley, Nolan Jones, and some pitching prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. Feel free to sign up for more of my ramblings, plus links to all of my content.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times profiles the privacy activists who fought Google, Facebook, & other tech giants over how they used customers’ data.
This research paper from May finds that hospitals’ leverage results in large price swings (PDF) even across “undifferentiated” services between different facilities, one possible contributor to the rising cost of health care that any reform proposal will need to address. Directing patients to lower-cost providers for such basic services could save patients and insurers a significant amount of money.
Food writer Michael Twitty visits his ancestral homeland of Ghana for the first time, in the company of four African-American chefs, to eat traditional Ghanaian food and reconnect with his roots.
Dan Gillmoor, director of the Knight Center at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, calls on all journalists to work together to defend the freedom of the press and expose the degradation of key cultural norms that underpin our society, including voting rights, free speech, and opposition to corruption.
Dr. David Glosser, the uncle of White House policy adviser and xenophobic reactionary Stephen Miller, argues that Miller’s anti-immigration stance is ‘hypocritical’ because Miller wouldn’t be in the U.S. were it not for the same immigration laws Miller is trying to roll back. That’s not a perfect argument – I don’t think it makes Miller a hypocrite for arguing for tighter borders, but it makes his beliefs about the borders inconsistent with his own history.
The Philadelphia Citizen and its partners launched a series of related pieces on the high cost of being ‘broke’ in Philadelphia. For example, WHYY looks at how the cost and limitations of public transit reduce job options for poor Philadelphians.
At the Athletic, Melissa Lockard wrote about her husband’s passing this month at age 41 of a rare cancer. The piece is free for all readers, and is every bit as gutting as you’d expect.
This Royals Review post’s title makes it sound like a mere hit job on the team, but “It is possible that the Royals do not understand how numbers work” makes a smart, broader point that the team’s fealty towards Alcides Escobar is irrational based strictly on the math, without involving emotions at all.
Our jury system is not well built to adjudicate questions of science, a fact demonstrated yet again when a jury decided in favor of a man who claimed Monsanto’s Roundup gave him cancer. The main problem here is that you can pretty much never say what caused someone’s cancer; we can make educated guesses, of course, but cancer is aberrant cell division, and can happen without any apparent external cause.
Then the Environmental Working Group (EWG) opportunistically put out a press release claiming that they found excessive quantities of glyphosate (Roundup) in breakfast cereals, without putting their claims through peer review or explaining why they used a standard of 1/10,000th that of the EPA tolerance for glyphosate. Slate explained why the EWG piece and credulous media reports on it are all bunkum.
An ongoing measles epidemic has sickened over 100 people in 21 states already. And if people try to tell you measles isn’t that bad, ask them if they know about the fatal brain-wasting complication that shows up ten years later.
An 11-month-old boy had a stroke from catching the chicken pox from unvaccinated older siblings. (He was too young for the vaccination.) I don’t understand how this isn’t child neglect. The boy will likely have permanent neurological damage and is at increased risk of another cerebrovascular incident.
I linked to the #MeToo stories on Four Barrel Coffee over the winter, when the scandal first broke. Eight months later, the business is recovering but the owners haven’t divested to employees as they promised. Their reasons aren’t invalid, but when you state to the public and to your workers that you’re going to do something, failing to do so is a serious abdication of responsibility.
This New York Times story asks what happens to #MeToo when the harasser is a feminist professor? The answer, entirely predictably, is that other academics closed ranks around her, rather than believing her accuser.
Neo-Confederates – Christ, how is this even a thing – are now openly courting Russian assistance, which has to be a joke, not that I think these people are smart enough to punk the mainstream media, but white supremacists making friends with our main geopolitical adversary, today and from the last 70 years, is too ridiculous to be real. Of course, these neo-Nazi types ain’t the brightest bulbs.
First We Feast’s Hot Ones videos can be kind of amusing for the guests’ reactions to the spiciest hot sauces they consume as the interview nears its end, but most of the time, that’s been the only appeal for me. Their latest episode with Michael Cera is the best pure interview I’ve seen from the show – and he takes the million-Scoville hot sauce like a damn veteran.
KUOW looks at how Ohio used technology to help clear its rape kit backlog and asks why other states, like Washington, aren’t doing the same.
West Virginia’s Republican Party just pulled an end run around voters to pack its Supreme Court before this fall’s elections.
Joe Scarborough asks why the GOP has abnegated its responsibilities on Russia despite clear evidence that the country interfered in our elections and continues to do so, even trying to stop ongoing investigations into Russia’s efforts.
Georgia leaders are trying to close polling places in heavily Democractic precincts, citing ADA requirements to justify their attempts at voter suppression. The ACLU is fighting it, but the real problem is the 2013 Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated key parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
BuzzFeed profiled Parkland shooting survivor Jaclyn Corin, who is less famous than some of her classmates but is more instrumental in organizing the students’ movement for greater gun control.
Entertainment Weekly interviewed Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar on LGBTQ representation in animation and children’s series.
I’m not sure if this Vox piece on why adults find it hard to make and maintain friendships is all that accurate, but its points, especially about being a reliable friend, are worth considering.
Board games: If you’re familiar with the very fun One Night Ultimate Werewolf – which, I recently discovered, my six-year-old niece is shockingly good at playing – there’s a spinoff title, One Night Ultimate Super Villains, on Kickstarter now. It’s a little more kid-oriented in theme and language.
Starling Games has a Kickstarter going for a new expansion to its Alien Frontiers game.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board games, environment, first amendment, health, links, privacy, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ August 11, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/11/18.

Just one Insider post this week, with scouting notes on some Yankees, Pirates, and Orioles prospects. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My Gen Con wrap-up is filed to Paste and I’ll update this post with the link when I get it.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter, which I’ve been sending out every ten days or so. And my book, Smart Baseball, is now just $9 on Kindle.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Eater exposes the toxic workplace culture at Estela and other restaurants operated by chef Thomas Carter.
ProPublica exposes the unelected officials who are running the VA from the shadows of Mar-a-Lago.
Dale Murphy, former Atlanta Braves superstar and near-Hall of Famer, wrote the best piece I have seen to date on players’ social media gaffes, such as the extremely bigoted tweets from Josh Hader and Trea Turner. Murphy gets it, and speaks with the gravitas folks like me simply can’t muster. Over at Medium, Justin Megahan asked about the baseball culture that produces young men who think this shit is funny, although I think it’s not specific to baseball, but a function of societal views of masculinity.
A major investigation by liberal rag … um Forbes found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross may have stolen over $120 million from investors, and lied about his assets and business activities on ethics disclosure forms when he was nominated. He’s still employed as of Saturday afternoon. Drain the swamp, indeed.
Twitter’s attempt to remain apolitical by refusing to ban conspiracy theorist and snake oil salesman Alex Jones is in itself a political choice. Parker Malloy writes here that Twitter still can’t figure out what kind of platform it wants to be; I don’t like the platform it has become.
WIRED‘s Issie Lapowsky writes that tech companies can’t win their war against Jones. That may be true, but doesn’t excuse inaction.
Also writing for WIRED, Clive Thompson offers thoughts on how to slow the spread of online hate. Doing nothing or disengaging are not good options.
Slate examines four hypotheses on why Twitter hasn’t moved against Jones yet, none of which is terribly satisfying.
Laura Ingraham went full white nationalist on Fox News this week; the Atlantic called her out on it, both in that her love of “country” seems to ignore this country’s founding principles, and that the population as a whole doesn’t agree with her.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the darling of the progressive left, but her increased media presence has just led to her producing a lot of bullshit answers, including the same kind of myth-repeating that characterizes the alt-right. Her policy proposals are at least interesting enough to discuss, but her sound bytes don’t reveal any depth to her ideas.
The Italian Senate is trying to delay the country’s new mandatory vaccination rules that arose in response to an ongoing measles epidemic in the supposedly developed country.
I’ve never had any use for PETA, and they reminded me why when they attacked Impossible Foods for testing its burgers on rats to satisfy federal safety requirements. If PETA’s interest is in improving the lives and welfare of animals … well, it’s not, as evidenced here. Their interest is in generating headlines. I guess they got their wish.
A couple in New Mexico appear to have stolen a $100 million painting just to keep it in their apartment, and perhaps stolen and sold other art works to finance a lifestyle beyond their apparent means. None of this was discovered until after their deaths, and family members still can’t believe it’s true.
The FDA has approved the first new malarial preventive drug in over 18 years.
One of my Senators, Tom Carper, wrote an editorial assailing the Trump administration’s plans to end emissions standards for cars. It’s going to take years to undo the environmental damage wrought by this regime.
Attorney General Jeff helped block an EPA action against Drummond Coal, one of his biggest donors, while he was still in the Senate, according to testimony in a recent bribery trial of a Drummond executive and a prominent Alabama law firm, both of whom had close ties to .
The sugar industry in Florida is under attack now for its role in pollution that is feeding toxic algae blooms; they’ve also got a long history of labor rights abuses and using tariffs to restrict sugar imports and raise consumer prices. The Florida GOP has historical ties to Big Sugar, and one leading gubernatorial candidate, Adam Putnam, has taken over $8 million in contributions from Big Sugar and its PACS.
Mike Salk, program director for ESPN Seattle 710 and longtime host of the Brock & Salk show, as well as a friend of mine, wrote about how Jim Abbott helped inspire him after an accident damaged his hand at age 12.
The online editorial comics site The Nib has a Kickstarter for them to start a print version of the publication. Some of the best editorial cartoonists online have appeared in the Nib or will appear in the magazine, including Matt “We Should Improve Society Somewhat” Bors.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alabama, baseball, environment, florida, health, links, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ August 5, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/4/18.

For Insiders this week, I had a slew of trade writeups:

I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday before I headed off to Gen Con 2018. You can see some of the photos I took there, the country’s biggest board gaming convention, on my Instagram. The writeup will come later this week.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter lately after slacking a bit during the spring (in large part because I can’t use the site’s editing function on an iPad), so, you know, do that signup.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The hard-to-believe true story of how an ex-cop led a conspiracy to rig the McDonald’s Monopoly game.

The Guardian rank a lengthy excerpt from a new book on denial and denialism, Keith Kahn-Harris’ Denial: The Unspeakable Truth. The excerpt covers a lot of ground, describing why denialism is more than just the denial of truth, why facts tend not to stop or change denialists’ minds, and the dangerous new phase of denialism before us.

The Verge has a longread on the gaming of Amazon’s listings and sales system by self-published romance authors. It’s just a bizarre subculture, and has led to a lawsuit over two authors’ use of the word “cocky” in their books titles. The journalist who wrote this piece, Sarah Jeong, just joined the New York Times editorial board; Vox, which owns the Verge, has a great piece on the non-troversy that alt-right trolls used to try to get her fired.

The Rumpus’ editor Lyz Lenz writes that writing still matters in the age of despair. Write like a motherfucker, as Cheryl Strayed (Wild) once wrote.

Why would the University of Michigan allow the presentation of “research” on homeopathy? Homeopathy is woo. After you dilute the substance in question that many times, all that remains is bullshit.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial board called on the state to crack down on doctors who spread anti-vaccine lies, as California is trying to do.

There’s a huge Dunning-Kruger epidemic in the anti-vaccine community, which has also managed to diverted time and funds away from more important vaccine research towards needless studies debunking claims like the nonexistent vaccine/autism link.

Spike Lee accused the President of giving the green light to the KKK and other hate groups during a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian about his upcoming film Black Klansman.

Gizmodo details how two strangers tried to wreck an Alabama realtor’s life by spreading a false story about the realtor sleeping with someone else’s husband.

The Washington Post looks at the board game Twilight Struggle’s new relevance in this political environment. I happen to find the game wildly overrated; it’s long, hard to set up, and requires intimate knowledge of the two player decks to play it well.

This Psychology Today essay assailing the ‘lack of resiliency’ of today’s college students seems to me to paint with an excessively broad brush, and contradicts the message we give our kids today to reach out when they need help. I’m also a little skeptical of the veracity of some of the stories – they sound like they were crafted for viral tweets – but even if they’re true, I’d rather too many kids ask for help than too few.

The anti-LGBT group Alliance Defending Freedom has been working to undermine basic protections for LGBT citizens, especially trans youth, using disingenuous and even dangerous language.

Former big leaguer Adam Greenberg, whose MLB career consisted of two PA, one in 2005 and one in 2012, is now running for Congress in Connecticut as a Republican. The fact that he’s turning to politics is interesting in itself, but the NY Times author here, John Altavilla, spends almost no time on Greenberg’s policy positions.

Would-be populist – and clear Islamophobe and race troll – Ben Shapiro is backed by a wide network of billionaire conservatives, many of whom also support more reviled figures like Ann Coulter and the Breitbart site.

Turning Point USA, the hard-right conservative group founding by diaper-clad college students, has been courting and praising anti-Semitic troll Bryan Sharpe, who has denied the Holocaust occurred and uses the triple-parentheses notation favored by white supremacists to identify or out Jewish people.

These QAnon people are batshit insane.

The Pennsylvania gun rights lobby watered down a bill aimed at keeping domestic abusers from obtaining guns.

The Washington Post profiled New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, although the piece doesn’t question him enough about their opinion pages.

An Astros fan wrote an open letter to the team’s GM, criticizing the decision to acquire Roberto Osuna.

There’s a new shape in town – really, totally new to mathematicians and physicists, but something that appears in nature: the scutoid.

An “Instagram star” – seriously, how the fuck is this a thing – is in hot water after her cookbook included ‘recipes’ likely to sicken or kill people who try to eat those dishes. One example that would be obvious to anyone who knows food is the advice to forage for and eat raw morels. A good editor is important; a bad one can lead to a PR disaster. Also, maybe don’t give someone who just takes nice pictures a cookbook deal.

Jack White (ex-White Stripes) is now the co-owner of a baseball bat manufacturer.

And finally, a video, as comedian Aamer Rahman explains why there isn’t any such thing as “reverse racism:”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, boardgames, denialism, links, longreads, racism, stick to baseball, vaccines, writing

→ July 14, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 7/14/18.

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

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

— Michael Hoffman (@Hoffm) July 6, 2018

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

→ June 30, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/30/18.

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

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

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

And now, the links…

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

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

Vaccines cause adults. pic.twitter.com/pcAeClyuYW

— Doc Bastard (@DocBastard) June 19, 2018

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

→ June 16, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/16/18.

My one piece for Insiders this week looked at which teams just drafted their new #1 prospects, along with two teams that probably just drafted their new #2 prospects (although it’s debatable in both cases). I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, which will be the last until July because I’m going on vacation.

I spoke to John Conniff at MadFriars about the Padres’ draft and the state of their rebuild.

I’ll be at Politics & Prose in Washington DC on July 14th, with my friend Jay Jaffe, to discuss our respective books (Smart Baseball and The Cooperstown Casebook) and all things baseball. I also have a tentative signing set up at Silver Unicorn Books in Acton, Massachusetts, for July 28th, so stand by for more details.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Most of what we know about the Stanford Prison Experiment is a lie. It turns out much of the so-called ‘experiment’ was staged or at least influenced by the organizers, and subsequent retellings have exaggerated its results.
National Geographic‘s cover story this month is on the rising tide of plastic in our oceans and rivers. As the article says, this isn’t a controversial subject: “There are no ocean trash deniers, at least so far.”
The Guardian goes long on a Texas man who finds missing persons – and is trying to find his daughter’s killer. The prime suspect is in jail for another murder, but hasn’t been charged with the death of Laura Miller for lack of evidence.
The Boston Globe suspended columnist Kevin Cullen for fabricating two stories about the Marathon bombings, which sounds like a firing offense to me. What doesn’t sound like a firing offense? A political cartoonist taking aim at the current President, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette fired Rob Rogers for just that, and nothing more. I wouldn’t line a birdcage with that paper now.
From the Atlantic: the extinguishing of the ‘beacon’ that was America. We are torturing migrant children while trying unsuccesfully to close our borders. Wherever the children of this modern concentration camp end up, they will end up with serious mental health problems that we won’t do a thing to treat. Shame on anyone – but especially any self-proclaimed Christian – who supports this atrocity.
Contractors with shady pasts are cashing in on the construction of these concentration camps too.
A linguist examines Trump’s use of words to push propaganda, with useful advice to journalists on how to stop enabling him.
The Washington Post shares the story of an unqualified 24-year-old who was promoted six times by the Trump Administration, even with inaccuracies on his resume, primarily because he was loyal. I’d have some sympathy for the kid if he wasn’t so dumb as to say he still supports Trump.
Are Nigerians the most successful ethnic group in the US?
Snopes confirms that a photo that had been going around showing two brothers, one vaccinated, the other unvaccinated and sick with smallpox is real. The images are extremely disturbing – smallpox was a disfiguring and deadly illness.
The mother of a two-year-old who died of measles has shared photos of the girl before and after she got sick; she died of heart failure on March 4th. She was exposed in the hospital when a baby with measles was placed in the same room as her. Every U.S. parent who declines to vaccinate should be forced to see these images.
Texas is the new hotspot for vaccine denialism, which you can add to the list of reasons I’m glad I don’t live or work in the state.
A Cornell study found that vaccine denialism is strongest at the ends of the political spectrum – both ends, the far right (religious nuts) and the far left (just plain nuts).
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has created a new resource library to help fight anti-vaxxer claims in court. Within that piece is a mention of Toni Bark, a fake doctor who tweets anti-vaccine propaganda and was actually permitted to testify in an Indiana court despite her lack of credentials.
A Belgian professor of risk communication was targeted by an anti-GMO professor/lawyer and ultimately fired for his public views in support of glyphosate, the highly successful and generally safe herbicide found in Roundup.
In the last 25 years, Antarctica has lost more than 25 trillion tons of ice, proving that the Chinese will go to unbelievable lengths to perpetuate this hoax.
Iowa Representative Steve King (R-duh), a white nationalist who doesn’t even bother with a hood, quote-tweeted and echoed a prominent European neo-Nazi, and nobody in his district seems to care.
Meanwhile, Virginia Republicans handed a primary win to “neo-Confederate” Corey Stewart in a Congressional race in the northern part of the state. Although many pundits seem to think this hands the district to his Democratic opponent, have we not learned by now that American whites are far more racist than they let on?
Republicans are also purging voter rolls as quickly as they can as they attempt to rig this November’s elections. The purge follows a SCOTUS decision that such purges of ‘infrequent’ voters don’t violate the NVRA, a 1993 civil rights law that should protect the rights of people eligible to vote who just haven’t done so in a while.
WIRED explores pro-eating disorder communities thrive on social media sites despite nominal attempts to moderate them.
My friend Lindsey Adler talked to Mets first baseman Dom Smith about being more prepared and more mature in his second go-round in the majors. (The Athletic subscription required.)
Australian comedian Eurydice Dixon was assaulted and killed just meters from her house by a 19-year-old assailant; police fumbled their response by saying women needed to take more responsibility for being aware of their surroundings. Dixon was 22.
Military History Now has a piece on a 19th century board game called Kriegsspiel, a tabletop war game that helped Prussian military leaders prepare for battles and was also a precursor to many modern tabletop games.
Cartoonist Adam Zyglis gave us this incisive look at the cost of Trump cozying up to Kim Jong Un.
I also liked these alternate proposals for dividing California into multiple states:

Alternative Plans For Splitting Up California pic.twitter.com/PaijKlq02s

— Bored Elon Musk (@BoredElonMusk) June 15, 2018

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

→ June 9, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/9/18.

The 2018 MLB Rule 4 draft has come and gone and I have recaps up for all National League teams and all American League teams. I also wrote my reactions to day one on Monday night, and held a Klawchat on Tuesday after the fourth round, while teams continued drafting.

You can find more details on my top 100 prospects for the draft on my Big Board, and can see my final first-round mock from Monday afternoon, which had 9 picks on the dot and flipped Arizona’s first two picks.

Over at Paste, I recapped what I saw at Paradox Interactive’s PDXCON in Stockholm last month, where they announced tabletop versions of four of their popular video game titles: Crusader Kings, Cities Skylines, Europa Universalis, and Hearts of Iron.

My free email newsletter is back and I hope it’ll be more or less weekly again now that the draft is over; I’m planning to send the next issue this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I will be at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, on July 14th, joined by my friend Jay Jaffe (The Cooperstown Casebook), and hope to announce a signing in the Boston area for the weekend of July 28th shortly.

And now, the links…

Kat Kinsman had the best piece I read on his suicide & what it means for the industry and society overall. (I’m sure there were many great pieces I didn’t read, too.)
Bourdain’s 1999 piece for the New Yorker on the dirty secrets of restaurant kitchens is what launched his career as a writer and eventually a celebrity (ex-)chef.
WIRED gives us a hybrid profile/book review around former DNI James Clapper, who just wrote a memoir that is highly critical of the current Administration and the societal trends that enabled it.
As a lifelong fan of the Muppets, I greatly enjoyed Slate’s group interview with several Muppeteers and execs as well as a TV critic and even a therapist who offers insights on the Kermit/Miss Piggy relationship.
The California judge who sentenced Stanford rapist Brock Turner to just six months in jail – reduced to three months for good behavior – has been recalled by voters, the first judge to be recalled in that state in 86 years. Julia Ioffe wrote a long piece for the Huffington Post on how Stanford law professor Michelle Dauber led the recall effort, citing the judge’s history of considering the needs of the rapists and abusers in his court over the impact of their crimes. Dauber also identifies Stanford as “one of the most unfriendly, if not the most unfriendly school to victims of sexual assault.”
Alia Shawkat (Maeby on Arrested Development) spoke to Vanity Fair about her disappointment in her co-stars’ comments in a recent New York Times interview that broached Jeffrey Tambor’s inappropriate behavior on set.
South Dakota Rep. Michael Clark said businesses should be able to turn away customers of color if they want. He later apologized and admitted the comment was racist, although Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. compared the moment to a hood being removed.”
Florida gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam likes to brag about being an “NRA Sellout.” While he was Commissioner of the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, his office stopped running background checks for concealed carry permits for nearly a year … because an employee couldn’t log on to the national database to run the checks. Thirty-odd other states, including Delaware, honor these permits under reciprocal agreements.
Florida is also one of the states that denies voting rights to convicted felons, and Governor Rick Scott, also a Republican, has made it even harder than ever for those citizens to regain that Constitutional right, often dismissing petitioners’ applications in mere minutes.
Thousands of Poles demonstrated against mandatory vaccination laws. A measles outbreak in Romania has already killed dozens of children, with 200 new cases a week. Some cretin named Kat Von D announced to the world she won’t vaccinate her as yet unborn child. We all deserve to die in a plague for creating this world.
Jess McHugh wrote about the societal expectation that women should smile, which is both very American and relatively new.
Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach rode in a local parade with a replica .50 caliber gun in the car alongside him. It didn’t go over well.
You’ve probably seen coverage of the increased numbers of scientists running for political office this year; the Washington Post documents a new wave of teachers doing the same, and they’re not all running as Democrats (as just about all scientists are).
The Guardian interviewed first-time author Elaine Castillo about her debut novel America is Not the Heart and issues of race and cultural appropriation.
The UN’s human rights investigator on extreme poverty has found that America’s poor are becoming even worse off under Trump. I’d like to see what portion of that underclass voted for Trump and/or other Republicans in 2016.
The Harvard Business Review offers some brief tips on how to be a more productive learner.
This NPR piece on raising better eaters by skipping the kids’ menu is generally good advice, even acknowledging that cost and time become factors in what we feed our kids. My daughter is an adventurous eater with a broad palate. When servers in restaurants compliment me on her taste, I tell them I can only take so much credit; I introduced her to lots of foods, but she was willing to try everything.
A rare bit of positive news in the fight against climate change: the cost of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere has plummeted. Now we just need to devote more public funds to the effort.
Doctor/scientist Edzard Ernst writes about realizing that homeopathy isn’t just useless, but actively harmful in the way it misleads patients and can steer them away from effective medical treatment. It’s not just that homeopathy has failed every test of whether it works, but it isn’t chemically possible for it to work.
Board game news: Game Salute’s new Kickstarter for A War of Whispers is nearing its $30,000 goal.
Asmodee Digital announced it’s going to bring some of its board game titles to Nintendo Switch.
Acram Digital released a new 30-second trailer for the Istanbul app, due by the end of the month for iOS and Android.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, climate change, florida, guns, kansas, links, mental health, muppets, south dakota, stick to baseball, suicide, vaccines

→ June 2, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/2/18.

My third first-round projection for Monday night’s MLB Draft went up on Thursday for Insiders; I’ll do one more on Monday morning. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday, and will do another on Monday afternoon. I wrote a piece earlier in the week for Insiders on why players withdrawing from the draft is a terrible idea for them, benefiting no one but the college coaches encouraging them to do so.

Longtime Marlins scout Orrin Freeman and his wife Penny are both facing awful health problems and mounting medical bills, so Penny’s daughter has set up a GoFundMe to help offset some of these costs. You can expect MLB to try to help one of its own as well. Of course, universal health care would make a difference in cases like this – and it could happen to any of us in time.

My book Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Washington DC’s famed bookstore Politics & Prose on July 14th, along with fellow author Jay Jaffe, to talk baseball, sabermetrics, and whatever else you kind readers ask about. I should be able to announce another event in the Boston suburbs for July 28th very soon.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Huffington Post’s Luke O’Brien finds the woman behind one of Twitter’s most vile Islamophobic accounts. The biggest question I have is why Twitter hasn’t kicked her off the service. Meanwhile, she’s directing her followers to attack O’brien, and various alt-right trolls are claiming her First Amendment rights were violated.
The Guardian‘s longread of the week looks at how American freedom of speech is threatened by white supremacists whose hate speech challenges even those who’ve sworn to defend that 1A right, including the ACLU. It’s easy to say neo-Nazis preaching hate are in fact inciting violence against marginalized groups, and that they’re beyond the boundaries of the First Amendment (since some forms of speech, like death threats, have long been criminalized), but moving the boundaries always creates new and unexpected quandaries.
New York has the hard-to-believe story of a 25-year-old con woman who fooled New York elites largely through social engineering and strategic cash drops in front of the right people.
I assume most of you have seen the Ringer’s exposé on 76ers GM Bryan Colangelo’s many secret Twitter accounts.
The BBC tells the story of six young stowaways put overboard on the ice in eastern Canada in 1868 by a sadistic British captain and his first mate. Four survived to tell their story, which was largely lost until now.
Also from the BBC, Maddy Savage looks back at when Sweden shifted drivers to the right-hand side of the road, a change that was literally enacted overnight after months of planning and public education.
Evan Grant wrote a fantastic piece for the Dallas Morning News on recent tragedies and challenges for the Rangers scouting staff. One area scout died in early April of a stroke; another lost his wife to cancer in February, and a third has just returned to the job after missing two years to care for his wife, who also had a stroke.
Rachel Herron writes for Vox about the frequent, overly racist calls she’d get as a 911 dispatcher.
Major media outlets gave disproportionate coverage to the Roseanne Barr controversy relative to the release of one estimate (since disputed) that the twin hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands caused at least 4600 deaths in that one U.S. territory.
Eve Peyser writes for VICE that the ‘Twitter mob’ got it right on Roseanne, but that is an outlier on a site that is often “a toxic cesspool” and a “viral outrage” generator. She also points out, correctly, that, “as a journalist it’s a useful career tool.” I have my problems with the site too, including its apparent non-policing of harassment, hate, and fraud, but it’s also been a career boon, and I’ve made many new friends and professional contacts through the site as well.
Buried behind the Roseanne Barr and Puerto Rico stories this week: Newly released emails show EPA leaders worked with a climate change denial group to combat information on the reality of climate change and to “tout” Scott Pruitt’s leadership of the agency.
The Administration may try to order power grid operators to buy power from specific, failing coal and nuclear plants, including many operated by a major Trump donor. This sort of economic dirigisme is a hallmark of fascist economies, not the free market principles long espoused by the Republican Party.
As measles outbreaks spread throughout the country, including a recent one in Maryland and Virginia, New York is considering expanding the religious “exemption” from mandatory vaccination rules. Many of you live in New York state, so if you do, please call your state representatives Monday to oppose any such expansion. Multiple courts have ruled over the past 110 years that public health considerations override such so-called religious freedom concerns (which may not even be real, as with the Catholic mother quoted in the piece).
A Harvard Law School professor argues that the NFL’s ban on players taking a knee is ‘flatly illegal’ under U.S. labor law.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Arkansas’s anti-abortion law, handing a victory to opponents of women’s rights. The case is expected to return to a lower court for a trial.
My friend Jeb Lund writes for NBC News that Trump should be afraid of the Mueller investigation because he’s an outsider whom the Republican Party has largely run out of uses.
I’ve included many links about the rising threat of antibiotic resistance, largely from overuse or rapid evolution in bacteria. But this Guardian story has a new twist – supply of the drugs is running low too.
The Gainesville Sun looks back at the 1923 Rosewood massacre, where a dubious rape accusation against a black man led a white mob to torch an entire black neighborhood, killing as many as 27. No one was ever even charged with a crime, even though at least one black man was tortured and lynched.
Astronomers have identified dunes of methane on the surface of Pluto.
The BBC has been working quietly to speak to North Korean citizens about their government and Dear Leader, with two commenting that sentiment is improving towards him because of market reforms even as they individually criticized him. Their Inquiry podcast also looked at North Korea in a May 24th episode that examined whether North Korea is broke. The short answer is ‘no,’ but there’s quite a bit of detail on how and why the repressive regime has managed to stave off a second economic catastrophe in three decades.
With news that Illinois became the 37th state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, leaving it just one state short of the required ¾ (after which we’ll have a debate over whether these votes are too late, I’m sure), Delaware’s Senate rejected a proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the state constitution. My state Senator, a co-sponsor of the amendment, was absent from the vote.
Monique Judge writes for The Root that Obama doesn’t owe this country anything as a former President, responding to a post on Splinter that criticized him for inaction in the face of a wave of racism and regressive policies.
The Splendid Table podcast looks at the burgeoning Philadelphia food scene, including two of the city’s preeminent chefs in Michael Solomonov (Zahav, Federal Donuts) and Eli Kulp (High St. on Market, my favorite restaurant in the city).
Board game news: Game Salute shared the draft Kickstarter for A War of Whispers, an area control game where players represent secret societies rather than armies.
Lil Cerebral Games also shared a draft Kickstarter, this one to bring back GAMES magazine Hall of Fame title TwixT, which has been out of print for some time.
Skyrim finally has that mod you’ve all been waiting for: You can now ride giant chickens and ducks. (Note: this piece’s author, Chris Livingston, and I went to high school together.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: astronomy, baseball, board games, climate change, con men, environment, first amendment, florida, links, philadelphia, puerto rico, science, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp, twitter, vaccines, women's rights

→ May 26, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/26/18.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up for Insiders. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Vulture, my ranking of the 25 best mobile board game apps went up last week.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in DC on July 14th and am shooting for an event in the Boston suburbs on July 28th. Throw a comment below if you think you could make the latter event.

And now, the links…

Longreads: the New Yorker looks at corrupt Chicago cop Ronald Watts, whose reign of terror in the city’s projects was ended by an FBI investigation and helped by a woman herself wrongfully charged with drug possession. Thirty-two convictions have already been vacated because of Watts’ own crimes, but he was involved in something like 500 in total.
The Guardian goes long on how a small group of dissidents ended the 23-year reign of Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh last year. The BBC’s Inquiry podcast from last week covered similar ground, asking why some revolutions succeed, starting with the recent peaceful regime change in Armenia.
60 Minutes investigates how the media fell for the story peddled by Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who talked a good game about her company’s medical products that never worked. She defrauded investors and put patients at risk, but hasn’t even been charged with a crime. You’ll get more jail time for a second arrest for marijuana possession (the federal mandatory minimum is 15 days) than Holmes did for a nearly billion-dollar fraud.
The New York Times‘ Sopan Deb sat down with the cast of Arrested Development for an interview with some very unsatisfying answers on Jeffrey Tambor’s on-set behavior. The men seem to be handwaving away whatever happened, while Jessica Walter (his victim here) and Alia Shawkat, the only women in the room, are outnumbered while standing up for themselves.
This SABR article by Pete Palmer is from 2017, but just crossed my timeline this week: Palmer looks at how big luck/randomness can be in individual year-to-year stats. One big takeaway is that for NOPS (similar to OPS+), “five percent of the players can change 40 or more points from year to year due to luck alone.”
Basketball writer Bo Churney took his own life at age 31 last week. His brother set up a fundraising page to benefit at-risk LGBTQ youth in Atlanta in Churney’s memory, and it has already passed $20,000 in just a few days.
A 30-year-old manchild living with his parents fought them in court over their demand that he move out, claiming he was entitled to six months’ notice of eviction. He lost, but of course he’s now some sort of folk hero, appearing on InfoWars on Friday.
A (now former) doctor spiked his girlfriend’s tea with an abortifacient and was sentenced to three years in prison after she asked the judge for leniency in his case.
Harley-Davidson took its tax cut from the Republican-led tax bill, closed a manufacturing facility in Kansas City, then bought back $700 million in stock.
Arizona’s Secretary of Education, a dingbat creationist, wants to weaken or delete references to evolution in state educational standards.
Who on earth told Jameela Jamil, who plays Tehani on NBC’s The Good Place, that she was “too ethnic” for Hollywood? She also discusses #MeToo in the embedded video interview. I’m halfway through Season 2 of The Good Place, which really hit its stride near the end of season one after a sluggish start.
Deadspin’s Tim Burke points out, yet again, that the claim that ESPN is losing subscribers over ‘politics’ is bogus.
From The Onion: ‘The Onion’ Has Finally Read Michael Cohen’s 2013 Email Regarding His Client Donald Trump And Would Like To Discuss The Matter Further At His Convenience.
The BBC revealed that Cohen received $400K from Ukraine’s government to arrange talks with President Trump.
An Associated Press investigation found that Trump fundraiser Elliott Broidy used his connections to enrich himself by trying to shift U.S. policy in the Middle East against Qatar.
Center-right Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin excoriates Devin Nunes for burning a source to save the President’s skin. Lawfareblog’s Benjamin Wittes writes on the same subject that Trump has ‘all the power’ through his unfettered interference with the FBI and DoJ.
The Kentucky congressional candidate who was told, when she was 13, by her congressperson that she could never be a fighter pilot beat the moderate candidate in the Democratic primary despite national party support for the latter candidate.
You’ve probably seen the story that the feds have lost track of nearly 1500 migrant children forcibly separated from their parents. The collective non-response by our politicians is reminiscent of the pattern in pre-WWI Germany described by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Two Montana residents detained by a Border Patrol agent for speaking Spanish are now talking to the ACLU about legal options.
Sweden distributed a ‘prepare for war’ leaflet to homes in anticipation of a cyber or terror attack.
There’s an Ebola outbreak in sub-Saharan Africa again, and while the new vaccine will help, it won’t stop the epidemic without changes in behavior.
Maine is dealing with increasing vaccination refusals from stupid parents. The answer is simple – change the law to eliminate nonmedical exemptions, especially the “philosophical exemption,” which amounts to “I’m an idiot and don’t like vaccines.” Get on it, Mainers.
There’s a new Kickstarter for a co-op zombie survival board game, Z First Impact, just out from WYSIWYGames.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, baseball, board games, chicago, frauds, links, longreads, metoo, stick to baseball, the swamp, tv, vaccines

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