Full Snow Moon Links

I'm not going to use the title supermoon, because that is a bunch of media hype, but here are some super links:

What happens to Loogootee water tower when Jack Butcher's wins record falls? and Doyel: State's winningest coach had no intentions of leaving home and J.R. Holmes will soon become second boys basketball coach in state to reach 800 wins – Indy Star.  80% of the decent stories I get from the Star are about high school basketball.  The rest are about stupid Indiana laws.

Should a Catholic priest be fighting in a boxing tournament? – America.  As a Bengal Bouts alum, I say hell yes.  (Career record 0-4. 0-5 counting the novice matches in the fall of freshman year)

‘It Will Cause a Scandal.’ The Pope and a Trusted U.S. Cardinal Clash Over Sex-Abuse Crisis – Wall Street Journal 

Massive Loss Of Thousands Of Hives Afflicts Orchard Growers And Beekeepers - The Salt

‘Food and the Wisconsin Idea’ talk discusses Wisconsin farming, solutions to dairy crisis – The Badger Herald  and Food Banks Are Overflowing With Milk - Weekend Edition Sunday

Private Mossad for Hire – The New Yorker  

In Need of Workers, the Midwest Recruits From Puerto Rico - Wall Street Journal (h/t cmoore)

Alabama newspaper editor calls for Klan return to 'clean out D.C.' - Montgomery Advertiser

Bolsonaro’s Brazil - London Review of Books

How the US has hidden its empire - The Guardian

Research, Extension, and Related Matters: Title VII - USDA ERS

Election Eve Links

Tomorrow is the big day.  It is the chance, after two long years, to give Donald Trump, and the Republican Party which foisted him on us, a giant fuck you.  I'll be going in first thing in the morning to cast my straight-ticket Democratic ballot.  It might make a difference for U.S. Senator and the statewide positions, but it will be meaningless for Congress and State House and Senate.  But it will be cathartic.  It is already raining, so after work tomorrow, I'll get the animals fed, make supper, then crack my first beer and turn on the TV and start blogging the election results.  Please tune in, and feel free to comment.  In the time between now and then, here are a few stories for you to enjoy:

The Southernization of the Midwest - Benjamin Studabaker.  I've resisted GOP efforts to turn Ohio into Alabama for a long time.

Wisconsin's $4.1 Billion Foxconn Boondoggle - The Verge

Rural America’s Own Private Flint: Polluted Water Too Dangerous to Drink - New York Times

Trump the Revealer - The Big Picture.  Excellent post by Ritholtz.

The President's Lies - The Atlantic   

Something's Happening in Texas - The Atlantic 

Can the Republic Strike Back? - Andrew Sullivan

Vote against all Republicans.  Every single one. - Max Boot!?

What the 2018 Campaign Looks Like in Your Hometown - Bloomberg

Idiots At The Gates - The Future of the United States

I recommend this New Yorker article on the recently concluded session of the Texas legislature.  The second-most populous state in the union is almost under the control of complete morons.  Only a few somewhat sensible elected officials prevent them from riding roughshod over reason and logic.  As I sit here on the eve of Independence Day and contemplate the immediate and medium-term future, I have little faith that the sensible folks will win out.  I'm pretty sure we will see these cultists foist their ignorant bigotry and witch doctor economics on the rest of the nation, and only after their policies are complete disasters will we be able to vote them out of office.  In the meantime, I am concerned we will end up seeing unacceptable amounts of violence as regular citizens suffer under their doomed-to-fail rule.  I wish I could be more optimistic, but the last two years have rendered that almost non-existent characteristic in my personality extinct.

End of August Mini-links

Here are a handful of stories I've seen recently:

This College Football Team Doesn't Want To Join The Big Leagues - Bloomberg.  North Dakota State.  I wouldn't if I were them.

After 75 years, baseball in Bakersfield has struck out - LA Times

The Rise and Fall of Gerd Bonk, the World Champion of Doping - Vice Sports

The Start-up That Watches Corn Grow, From Orbit - The Atlantic

Minnesota Farmers Turn To Bankruptcy As Low Prices Continue - AgWeb

America's Real Mountain Of Cheese Is On Our Plates - The Salt

The Biggest Distillery You've Never Heard of is in Lawrenceburg, Indiana - Cincinnati Magazine

The Feudal Origins of America's Most Hated Tax - The Atlantic

Where the Confederacy is Rising Again - Politico

Trouble Signs for Donald Trump: Ambivalence in Exurbs - Wall Street Journal.  I'd be embarrassed if rural areas showed up on this chart.

Another Reason To Hate Texas

Texas Monthly:

Not only did they foist this asshole onto the national stage, they've funded his campaign and they are going to keep him in the race tonight.  I will remember that for a long time, and I am awesome at holding a grudge.

Update:

In the Army I had a friend from CO who always said while in the bathroom- "Here I sit, butt cheeks flexing, giving birth to another Texan."

— John Cole (@Johngcole) March 2, 2016

Driven

Breeders' Cup Weekend Links

American Pharaoh closed out his racing career by winning the Classic.  I've got the World Series and Notre Dame football on TV, and a fridge-load of Pumpkin and Oktoberfest beers to finish before November comes.  Here are some stories for your reading pleasure:

Goodnight and Thank You, Grantland - The Atlantic.  I'll miss that site.

Blades of Glory - Grantland.  One last story from them.

The State v. Robertson - SBNation

Kentucky's Horse Country Opens Barn Doors to Fans Before Breeders' Cup - Wall Street Journal

Early 2016 to bring 'wave' of crop selling, says Bunge CEO - Agrimoney. Not surprisingly, I'm also a bear.

Young Farmers Don't Need Taxpayers' Help - Bloomberg

Why Is It So Hard To Save Gulf Of Maine Cod? They're In Hot Water - The Salt

The Most Haunted Road in America - Longreads

Mary Fields: Former Slave, Pioneer Woman, Certified Badass - Priceonomics

The astronomer and the witch - how Kepler saved his mother from the stake - The Conversation

Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical - The Guardian

Ask Citylab: What's the Deal with Steam Rising from NYC streets? - Citylab.  What a massive system.

The 'Electronification' of Everything - Bloomberg.  Gallium?

Oil Producers Curb Megaproject Ambitions to Focus on U.S. Shale - Bloomberg

Hopes for 'Golden Age of Gas' Evaporate - Wall Street Journal

Clinton Foundation Faces Revisions - and Possible Reckoning - 100 Reporters.  Damn, they are crooks.  Between Hillary and the Republican shit show, that socialist is looking pretty good.

Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts - The Atlantic

We Mapped the Uninsured. You'll Notice a Pattern - The Upshot

Minster Oktoberfest Weekend Links

I didn't make it to the local Oktoberfest celebration, but that still didn't prevent me from being late with the weekend reads:

Not Just Another Number 30 - SBNation

Donald Trump's Misadventures in Professional Football - Priceonomics

Sneaker Wars: Inside the Battle Between Nike and Adidas - GQ

Monsanto To Chart Growth Plan as Farmers Feel Squeezed - Wall Street Journal

Drought Is Driving Beekeepers And Their Hives From California - The Salt

Beef Isn't For Dinner Anymore as Americans Devour Cheaper Pork - Bloomberg

Farmer digs up woolly mammoth bones in Michigan soy field - Washington Post (via the journalist)

Why It Was Easier To Be Skinny in the 1980's - The Atlantic.  Fingering the feeding of antibiotics to livestock, which screw with gut bacteria.  Don't know if I buy that, but it is interesting.

Dick Cantwell's Beer Is Immortal - Seattle Met

Volkswagen's Villains - Slate

Atomic Summer: An Essay by Joni Tevis - Longreads

The Man Who Launched The GOP's Civil War - Politico

How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina - Backchannel

Voter ID and driver's license office closures black-out Alabama's Black Belt - AL.com

Closures announced Wednesday will leave 28 Alabama counties without a place to get a driver's license.

More Gun Control, Fewer Gun Deaths

National Journal:

 
Surprisingly, some of the states with lower death rates include cities well-known for gun deaths, such as Chicago, Milwaukee and Baltimore.  There must be a lot of accidental shootings, suicides and other gun deaths in some of the states with weak gun laws.

A More Perfect Union

Those Damn Baptists

The Atlantic:

While observations abound about "the rise of America's craft breweries," the story has been very different on the state level. Vermont, for example, had one brewery for every 25,000 residents in 2012. Mississippi, meanwhile, had one for every 994,500. These aren't anomalous islands of booziness and temperance—they're exemplars of their regions. The nine states with the fewest breweries are all in the South. What is it about the region that might make this true?
In short, it's because of the Baptists. Steve Gohmann, a professor of economics at the University of Louisville, recently published a paper in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice cataloguing the potent blend of regulation, religion, and corporate interest that makes the South less hospitable to small breweries.
Around the nation, big beer producers contribute to the campaigns of politicians who will support policies that discourage competition from local upstarts—for example, taxes on breweries and laws that prevent breweries from selling their kegs directly to consumers (instead of through a distributor). But what's unique about the South is that there's a voting bloc—the Baptists—whose moral stance against alcohol happens to align with large producers' desires to keep new competitors from getting started in the business. The support of Baptists provides Southern politicians with a reason to hinder brewers that politicians in other regions don't have. As a result, the states with the most Baptists tend to have the fewest breweries.
What Gohmann found is a correlation, of course, but it's a convincing one.

Personally, I prefer areas with large numbers of Catholics (or Diet Catholic Lutherans) and small numbers of Baptists.  I'll avoid the South.

Where People Moved In 2014

Out of God's Country and into the South (or North Dakota, if you were really desperate for work):

Early March Midweek Links

 A few stories to check out:

Kentucky's Unbeaten Season Makes Vegas Squirm - Bloomberg.  Some sports books gave 50:1 odds against Kentucky going undefeated.

Farmers Put Down the Plow for More Productive Soil - New York Times

India's Beef Boom Threatened As Age-Old Tensions Flare - Bloomberg

More extreme weather could mean less wheat for Kansas - Wichita Eagle.  Also, less wheat for most of the midwest.

The Growing Risk of Suicide in Rural America - The Atlantic.  With the farm economy tanking, expect it to get worse before it gets better.

Maybe You've Been Tricked Into Liking Strawberries So Much - Pacific Standard.  Strawberry Shortcake and friends were a marketing trick?  I think my 10-year-old self thought so.

The Long, Strange Saga of the 180,000 Carat Emerald - Bloomberg

Don't Drink the Water - The Atlantic

Secede? Separatists Claim Texas Never Joined United States - New York Times.  Jackasses.

Some States Fight To Keep Their Wood Fires Burning - McClatchy.  Maybe the legislators ought to read the regulations so they understand them (or, being Republican, have somebody read the regulations to them).  They apply to manufacturers and newly purchased wood stoves.  And many stoves have met the requirements for years (and have been working with EPA).  But, hey, EPA is evil.

Selma, 50 years after march, remains a city divided - LA Times.  Holy shit, the south is an awful place.

Has The Snow Finally Stopped? - Fivethirtyeight

They Really Are Slow Learners in The Deep South

As if they were out to prove Alabama didn't learn a damn thing from the Civil War or the battle for civil rights, Judge Roy Moore and crew decided to pretend they could overrule the federal courts.  Again.  What a fucking shithole.  They are really taking any flexibility the Supreme Court could have had out of their hands.  Looks like Alabama will have to be put in its place.  Again.  Exhibit A against states rights.  Again. 

Spring Training and Jim Crow

The Upshot has an interesting piece about the battle over segregation during spring training after the Dodgers broke baseball's color line.  I didn't realize that is why the Dodgers established Dodgertown:

By 1948, with Robinson a full-fledged Brooklyn Dodger, Rickey and a fellow part-owner of the team, Walter O’Malley, opted to confront the spring training problem head-on by taking over a decommissioned naval air station in sleepy Vero Beach, Fla., which soon became a national baseball landmark called Dodgertown.

Although Robinson found Dodgertown “like being confined to a reservation,” the camp, with its own barracks and dining halls, would liberate the team from Jim Crow. Players called their new baseball diamonds “Ebbets Field No. 2.”

But Dodgertown itself could not solve the larger problem of racial separation in the Grapefruit League. More than a decade after Robinson joined the Dodgers, black players for other teams were still shunned by many Florida hotels and restaurants. African-American spectators in West Palm Beach were forced to enter the baseball park by slipping through a gap in the stadium fence.

Decrying “Spring Training Woes,” Wendell Smith wrote in Chicago’s American in 1961 that the black player’s “patience is growing short.”

Robinson had long called for economic pressure against Grapefruit League team owners who resisted change, and spurred on in part by the N.A.A.C.P., the Cardinals’ owner, Anheuser-Busch, struck a housing deal in 1961 to move all of its players into two adjacent motels for spring training in 1962; other teams were not far behind in integrating.

They had to put up with that shit for almost 16 years after Jackie Robinson's first appearance at spring training in 1946?  That is insane. It is hard to believe that was going on only a dozen years before I was born. The south is such a disgrace to the United States of America. 

The Off-Court Life of Dean Smith

I knew a lot about Dean Smith's coaching career, but I forgot how politically active Smith was:

There was perhaps no issue more important to Smith than civil rights. Most famously, in 1966, he recruited Charlie Scott to Chapel Hill, making Scott the first black scholarship athlete in the University of North Carolina’s history and the first black basketball star in the Atlantic Coast Conference. But Smith wasn’t like other pioneering coaches, who broke college sports’ color barrier for purely pragmatic reasons. (Alabama football coach Bear Bryant famously started recruiting black players to Tuscaloosa only after the University of Southern California—and its fullback Sam Cunningham—had run over the Crimson Tide in a 1970 contest.) To Smith, racial justice was about much more than winning and losing. “It was simply the correct thing to do,” he wrote. Smith understood this far sooner than many other white Americans.

As a teenager in Topeka, Kansas, he’d persuaded his high school principal—five years before the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education—to integrate the school’s basketball team. Nine years later, as an assistant basketball coach at UNC, he took it upon himself to help integrate Chapel Hill when he and his pastor invited a black theology student with them to dinner at the town’s finest restaurant, which was then still segregated. Since the Tar Heels ate many team meals there, Smith was betting that the restaurant wouldn’t want to jeopardize that regular business by refusing to serve him and his guest. Still, back in 1958, it was a gamble. As Smith’s pastor later recalled for John Feinstein: “Back then, he wasn’t Dean Smith. He was an assistant coach. Nothing more.” Smith and his guests were served and a bastion of segregation reluctantly fell.

Even after Smith became a brand name—when many of his similarly accomplished colleagues began to shy away from doing or saying anything controversial for fear of damaging their own brands—he continued to act on his convictions. A staunch and unswerving liberal, Smith protested against the Vietnam War, campaigned in favor of a nuclear freeze, and supported gay rights. He was such an avowed opponent of capital punishment that he’d frequently take his teams to visit North Carolina’s death row at Central Prison in Raleigh and once told North Carolina’s governor, “You’re a murderer.”

Smith was similarly outspoken on behalf of his players: He was an early advocate for paying college athletes and he used to set aside a portion of his $300,000 annual salary from Nike—for putting the company’s sneakers on his players’ feet—to a fund that helped players who didn’t graduate pay for their degrees. (He also divided up half of that Nike paycheck between his assistant coaches and administrative staff.) Once, when Duke’s Cameron Crazies student section questioned the intelligence of UNC’s black star J.R. Reid with the sign “J.R. Can’t Read”—a sign that Smith and others considered racially motivated—Smith boasted to reporters that Reid and Scott Williams, another black UNC player, had higher combined SAT scores than two white Duke stars, Danny Ferry and Christian Laettner. All the while, Smith was a fervent booster of the university that employed him, frequently lamenting that it was a sign of society’s skewed values—“a Kierkegaardian ‘switching of price tags’ ”—that he received more praise and attention than UNC’s professors.

I especially enjoyed the Duke story.  God, how I hate Duke.  I do remember Dean Smith speaking out to defend a women's college player's right to turn her back on the flag during the national anthem as an Iraq war protest, but I forgot about all the other things he did. 

Sprawl Kills

Wired:

Pedestrian deaths in the United States are at a five-year high, and if you’re among the few people who walks around Orlando, you’re more likely to be killed by a car than anyone else in the nation. You can thank 60 years of auto-centric planning and transportation policies for that.
Things aren’t much better elsewhere in the southeast or southwest, two regions that account for the majority of the 20 most dangerous metropolitan areas for pedestrians. All of them boomed after World War II, an era when urban design and transit planning favored the almighty automobile above walking, cycling and mass transit.
That’s the key takeaway from “Dangerous By Design,” a sobering report by the National Complete Streets Coalition, an arm of Smart Growth America. The report outlines the riskiest cities for pedestrians and argues–at a time when Congress is debating a transportation funding bill–that state and federal legislators and regulators must do more to make our streets safer for all who use them.
The report notes that 45,284 pedestrians were killed between 2003 and 2012 (the latest year for which data were available). The numbers have spiked in the past few years, from just over 4,200 deaths in 2007 to nearly 5,000 in 2012, and the researchers behind it are at a loss to explain why. But they make no bones about arguing pedestrians and cyclists would be safer on “complete streets”—those that include crosswalks and dedicated bike and bus lanes to slow traffic and increase safety.
The common link is among cities in the Sunbelt, which grew rapidly after World War II, when transit design abetted suburban sprawl and focused primarily on drivers.
There, low-density neighborhoods “rely on wider streets with higher speeds to connect homes, shops, and schools—roads that tend to be more dangerous for people walking,” the report says. More than half of all pedestrian deaths recorded from 2003-2012 occurred on wide arterial roads designed to move cars quickly.
The safest cities, according to the study, tend to be older ones, particularly in the northeast, that developed long before the car became the dominant form of transport.

Sprawl makes pedestrians more rare, which leads folks to forget they might be present.  God forbid you try to cross a multi-lane arterial street without a light.  One other thing to note is that Florida has the four cities with the highest danger index.  I think more older drivers may contribute to a higher fatality rate for pedestrians.  I am surprised Cincinnati or Dayton don't appear, as they are largely sprawling metro areas.  However, winter may limit the amount of pedestrian activity here when compared to the Sunbelt.

The White, Anti-Obama Bloc

Nate Cohn highlights an interesting map:

I can't believe Illinois had 5 counties go 80% anti-Obama, but Indiana had zero.  It looks to me like Sioux County is the only county in Iowa to go 80% anti-Obama.  No surprise there.  And the social ion of the South is not surprising, but is very disturbing.

Tennessee Tries To Claim Crazy Conservative Crown

In order to prevent Nashville from building a bus rapid transit route (BRT), the legislature banned construction of BRT systems within the entire state:

Tennessee lawmakers overwhelmingly voted in favor a bill that bans the construction of bus rapid transit (BRT) anywhere in the state.
The impetus for the vote was a proposal to build a $174 million BRT system in Nashville called The Amp, which would’ve ran on a 7.1 mile route and served rapidly growing neighborhoods across the city. There’s a more detailed summary of the project over at The Tennessean.
Although BRT has been shown to revitalize economies and reduce congestion, opponents of The Amp voiced concerns about the safety of unloading bus passengers along roadways and whether private land would be used to build dedicated bus lanes.
After the vote, Amp opponents revealed that the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, founded with the support of brothers Charles and David Koch, had lobbied in favor of the bus ban.
The legislation is startlingly specific: Senate Bill 2243 forbids “constructing, maintaining or operating any bus rapid transit system.”
The Senate version of the BRT ban also forbids buses from “loading or discharging passengers at any point within the boundary lines of a state highway or state highway right-of-way not adjacent to the right-hand, lateral curb line.” Though the House struck that provision and sent revised legislation back to the Senate, it would still require special approval from the Tennessee Department of Transportation and local government bodies.

I still don't think Tennessee is as stupidly regressive as Mississippi or Arizona, but it is making it's case for inclusion in the top five idiot conservative states. Please tell me that the opponents of the project who revealed that Americans for Prosperity lobbied for the ban were making that up to troll liberals.  I can't imagine those asshole Koch brothers think it is worthwhile to waste money on idiot state legislators in an ass-backward state just to kill one little mass transit project that they should be pretty confident would fail anyway (see note about ass-backward state).  If it is true they were lobbying for this idiotic legislation, then that is proof that income taxes are way too low on those two jackasses and other too-rich jerks.

Mississippi Passes "Religious Freedom" Law

This probably should say, "Gays allowed, but we reserve the right to discriminate"

Apparently, the state wants to retain its ranking as the leading state in the nation - in bigotry:

Mississippi, the state where it's not illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of his sexual identity and only ratified the Constitutional amendment banning slavery last year, just got a new "religious liberty" law.
The Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act was signed into law tonight by Gov. Phil Bryant after the state's Senate and House passed it by significant majorities on Tuesday. Its vague wording is similar to an Arizona bill that Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed in February, which would have made it legal for businesses to refuse to serve people for religious reasons. The bill was prompted by lawsuits against wedding cake makers and photographers who refused to work at a same-sex ceremony.
Effective July 1 of this year, any person (and Mississippi defines businesses as persons) "whose religious exercise is substantially burdened by government" may use this law as a defense.
The law also changes Mississippi's seal. Since the state was founded in 1817, its seal has been an eagle and the words "the Great Seal of the State of Mississippi." Now, the seal will also say "In God We Trust." The law didn't make any changes to Mississippi's flag, which is the only one in the country with the Confederate flag on it. Earlier this year, Bryant said he would not change his state's flag.

Didn't Mississippians claim a religious justification for businesses refusing to serve black people (amongst numerous apartheid policies) a few decades back?  Boy, wasn't that a shining beacon of freedom to the world?  It's also nice of the legislature to work on the important issues, like adding "In God We Trust" to the state motto, as opposed to fixing the nation's worst schools and highest poverty rate.  At least the state comes in below Texas for highest percentage of the population without health insurance.  It also still tops the list of states I'm least likely to ever move to.