No one wants to give it to the Yankees because of the payroll — the perception that any Tom, Dick or Cashman could run baseball ops backed by Steinbrenner wallets. In reality, the Yankees have a well-run baseball operation.
One possible answer is that Gosnell might be particularly depraved. On his own, he came up with the idea that murdering a fetus near the moment of birth was morally permissible, at least if the mother asked him to do it. That’s comforting. It lets us console ourselves with the thought that such brutality is a fluke and not likely to be repeated.
But that’s probably not the right answer. While murder rates for almost every group in society have plummeted in recent decades, there’s one group where murder rates have doubled, according to CDC and National Center for Health Statistics data — babies less than a year old.
[…]
It could be that the teaching power of abortion law is eroding more than the moral sense of doctors. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, infant homicide is shockingly common. Its most recent 2002 report suggests that the day a person is born is, by far, the most likely day for them to be killed.
[…]
A far better choice exists. As a society, we could agree that there really is little difference between killing a being inside and outside the womb. We should admit that our system of abortion law is dehumanizing. The better course is to protect even small voiceless human beings from more powerful people who would rather see them dead, whether that killing happens inside or outside the womb.
I don’t like large numbers without context. Phrases like “they called for a $21 billion budget cut” or “the probe will travel 60 billion miles” or “a 150,000-ton ship ran aground” don’t mean very much to me on their own. Is that a large ship? Does 60 billion miles take you outside the Solar System? How much is $21 billion compared to the overall budget? (That last question is why I made my money chart.)
A friend of mine, Glen Chiacchieri, has created a Chrome extension to help solve this problem: Dictionary of Numbers. It searches the text in your browser for quantities it understands and inserts contextual statements in brackets. It might turn the phrase “315 million people” into “315 million people [≈ the population of the United States]“.
Michael is convinced that it is time that I just admit that I am wrong, and he is right about the New York Yankees being a magical species, not unlike house elves. He is fairly enraged that I will not just admit defeat. I picked the Yankees to collapse under their own weight this year. He thinks I’m a flat-earther who will not face the obvious truth — that the Yankees will always, continuously, endlessly, constantly, incessantly and unceasingly win forever and ever, amen. He thinks it is way past time for me to admit it doesn’t really matter who is actually ON the Yankees — doesn’t matter if every single baseball player on earth gets hurt and they are forced to have Shecky Greene hit second and play centerfield. In this case, Mike is convinced that Shecky Greene would hit .289 with 24 homers and win a Gold Glove.
Over the last 12 months, piracy off the Horn of Africa has nearly disappeared. In the first 16 weeks of 2013, there have been no vessel hijackings reported (pdf) to the US Office of Naval Intelligence. And according to the UN, the last vessel to be commandeered by militants was the Greek tanker MV Smyrni on May 10, 2012, almost a year ago.
(via Taegan Goddard)
In the end, it’s not where you eat but what you choose off the menu that matters — and eating at Subway is just as likely to make you fat as pulling up to the drive-thru at McDonald’s, researchers concluded.
(via Dave Pell)
I quote these passages not to suggest in any literal way that Ariel Casto’s evil is ingested by anyone who reads about his story, but to point out the idea that for all the scrupulous reporting what happened to the three women in Cleveland we are left with an excess of obscenity and cruelty that cannot be neatly stowed away inside a news story. I can’t help asking, for whom, and for what purpose, were these details publicized? Why do I need to know what I now know?
(via Dave Pell)
“Is there some way to avoid [piracy]? I mean can I research DRM or something?” lamented one poster. “Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! … Not fair,” wrote another.
Law enforcement has successfully captured Dzhokar Tsarnaev, and DOJ has announced that Tsarnaev is being interrogated without first being read his Miranda rights because the DOJ thinks that the public safety exception to Miranda applies. Back in 2010, I blogged a lot about Miranda in this setting. Here are a few reminders about the law here:
A kidney “grown” in the laboratory has been transplanted into animals where it started to produce urine, US scientists say.
Similar techniques to make simple body parts have already been used in patients, but the kidney is one of the most complicated organs made so far.
(via Dashiell Bennett)
