Quadropolis<\/a>, the fun new city-building game from Days of Wonder, is also up over at Paste<\/em>. It’s a little more complex than Ticket to Ride (DoW’s biggest title), but my daughter, who’s now 10, loved it. There are many ways to score, so it’s a game of choosing two or three of those paths to focus on rather than trying to do a little of everything.<\/p>\nThere was no chat this week due to travel, and I’ll be taking the beginning of this week off to work on my book, returning to ESPN duties on Thursday (and chatting as well).<\/p>\n
And now, the links:<\/p>\n
\n- HTTPS is now now vulnerable to a new exploit<\/a>. This is kind of a big deal because the “s” is supposed to mean that the connection is secure.<\/li>\n
- The Rio Olympics are probably going to be a disaster, and the IOC is a corrupt mess, but the inclusion of a separate team of athletes who are refugees was one of the IOC’s most noble decisions in ages. One of those ten athletes is a Syrian swimmer who swam for three hours to push her refugee boat to safety<\/a>, saving the lives of 20 other refugees in the process.<\/li>\n
- This week, vaccines and the Presidential race collided in a big way, as delusional Green Party candidate Jill Stein continued to pander to the anti-vaxer movement<\/a> with equivocations so broad the Porter in Macbeth thought she was overdoing it. She’s wrong, and so is snopes’ defense of her statements<\/a>, according to the important pro-science (and anti-pseudoscience) blog Skeptical Raptor.<\/li>\n
- Stein’s moment of science denial means Hillary Clinton is the only one of the four candidates who hasn’t pandered to anti-vaxers<\/a>. This is important, because if you think people who believe something so monumentally stupid as this anti-vaxer bullshit are a constituency you can and should capture, I’m not voting for you.<\/li>\n
- The Sacramento Bee<\/em>, a paper in a state where I’d guess Stein has some support, also ran an op ed calling her view disingenuous<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- On to the election \u2026 Meg Whitman, a politically active Republican who ran for governor of California on the GOP ticket, has chosen to support Hillary Clinton<\/a> with her money and her time, because she views Trump as a dangerous demagogue, comparing him to Hitler and Mussolini and \u2013 the part I both liked and agree with \u2013 “warned that those who say that ‘it can\u2019t happen here’ are being na\u00efve. I connected the Sinclair Lewis book of that name<\/a> to Trump back in March.<\/li>\n
- The former head of the CIA quit his job at CBS and endorsed Clinton<\/a>, explaining why he believes she’s the right choice for our national security in this first-person op ed.<\/li>\n
- In the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian<\/em>, columnist Nick Cohen writes that the cowardice of other Republicans has allowed Trump to get this far<\/a>. This isn’t the GOP of Ronald Reagan, nor is it the GOP for whose candidates I have voted dozens of times in federal, state, and local elections since I first gained the vote in 1991.<\/li>\n
- I thought this was the best political-comedy tweet of the week:
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