Yasiel ... could rhyme with a**hole

I'm not saying this just because I'm a St. Louis Cardinals fan who got tired of the schtick of Yasiel Puig during last year's playoff series. I'm saying it because, per ESPN, outrightly refusing to participate in a pop-up drill is a routine that got manager Don Mattingly and teammate Adrian Gonzales both pissed at him too.

And, rightly so. Especially since, per Mattingly here, Dodger management has a two-tier system and is giving star treatment to Puig even though he was just a rookie just a year ago.

Back in October, Mattingly said he had a different vision of handling Puig than the rest of Dodgers management.

"Leave it to me, it'd be one way, but that's not necessarily the way the organization wants things to go," Mattingly said at his famous end-of-season news conference. He wouldn't elaborate much, but he said, "I just think there has to be a development system that we adhere to with Yasiel, along with all the other guys."

Add in reporting to spring training overweight, and you're going to piss off the boss man even more.

We're now at the level of someone having a Deion Sanders ego dunked in a vat of steroids even if, unlike Deion, he's only been up one year, and unlike Deion, doesn't also play football. Or, we're at the level of a twice-as-insufferable Aroldis Chapman.

And, it is something that will get you benched by Donnie Baseball, especially if your stats otherwise warrant it. And, looking not only at his teh suck in spring training of this year but also his split stats from last year after his hot June start, he could be closer to being Pine Time [snark] than he might think. Batting .270 with an .850 OPS+ is far different than .436 and 1.180.

Good luck, Donnie, with a kid not yet 23. Have fun, Dodgers management, if this scenario turns out to be real and at some point, you even start thinking trade. Andre Ethier, might get more takers. Even, with the right trade, Carl Crawford, or Matt Kemp, might be more valued. Per some of ESPN's other anonymous polling, I wonder how the rest of the Dodger clubhouse feels about him at times. And, yes, chemistry still matters. Even more so if you're not contributing with the bat or glove. And beyond the slump in the latter part of last year, we already know that Puig's contribution with the glove/arm is often "indifferent." Per the first link, at the start of this year, just like most of last year, we also know that Puig's speed does not translate into baserunning smart.

Update, a day later: Donnie Baseball says "we're good." Yeah, and California's not in a drought. Also, no, ESPN, he's not the 31st-best player in baseball. He might make the bottom edge of the top 50. And might not.

Speaking of Puig and Chapman, I sure hope Cardinals GM John Mozeliak did due diligence on the head, as well as bat, feet and glove, of Cuban prospect Aledmys Diaz.

Is it something in Fidel Castro's water supply? Has he taken a Jack D. Ripper clue about precious bodily fluids, water, and defecting baseball players?

Dietary supplements: myth vs reality (updated to included actual diet types)

If dietary supplements cause as much as 20 percent of severe liver damage cases in the US, why do people keep taking them?

Good question. 

It relates to the myths of the supplement industry vs. those of traditional "western" medicine, especially the pharmaceutical business.

Myth/reality No. 1: Big Pharma is big business. Yeah, and so is Big Supplements. Indeed, so big of a business that we are led to ...

This reality:

Americans spend an estimated $32 billion on dietary supplements every year, attracted by unproven claims that various pills and powders will help them lose weight, build muscle and fight off everything from colds to chronic illnesses.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/22/3832809/spike-in-harm-to-liver-is-tied.html#storylink=cpy

That ain't chicken scratch. And, so, because these $32 billion of claims are unproven, we're led to ...

Myth/reality No. 2: Big Pharma is poorly regulated. Big Supplements is even more poorly regulated, and officially so by federal law that officially prevents tighter regulation. Add to that the fact that for supplement diehards, many of your products are made in China, the same country where food factories put melamine in dog food and human infant formula, and that 20 percent of severe liver damage may just be the tip of a supplements damage iceberg.

The reality?

(A)  federal law enacted in 1994, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, prevents the Food and Drug Administration from approving or evaluating most supplements before they are sold. Usually the agency must wait until consumers are harmed before officials can remove products from stores.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/22/3832809/spike-in-harm-to-liver-is-tied.html#storylink=cpy

And, Big Supplements is big enough, and aggressive enough, to make sure that that supplements law is currently safe from tightening, or even from being fully enforced with the few teeth it has.

Thus, this further reality:

The FDA estimates that 70 percent of dietary supplement companies are not following basic quality control standards that would help prevent adulteration of their products. Of about 55,000 supplements that are sold in the United States, only 170 - about 0.3 percent - have been studied closely enough to determine their common side effects, said Dr. Paul A. Offit, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an expert on dietary supplements. 

And, because the way the 1994 law is written, all the FDA can do is "estimate."

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/22/3832809/spike-in-harm-to-liver-is-tied.html#storylink=cpy

Myth/reality No. 3: If there is any harm from bad supplements, or misuse of them, it's only to me. Well, no, not if you're an anti-vaxxer who thinks supplements are the answer to measles or whatever. If you think Supplement X prevents you from Illness Y, and said illness is readily transmittable, and you have other options that would do better against that illness, then you're hurting others.

Beyond myth vs. reality, Americans have always had a strong strain of the Ptolemy vs Euclid issue: The desire for, and the belief that they deserve, a royal road to something. (That's despite, or maybe because of, other Americans preaching the myth of the Calvinist work ethic.)

Result? This:

While many patients recover once they stop taking the supplements and receive treatment, a few require liver transplants or die because of liver failure. Naive teenagers are not the only consumers at risk, the researchers said. Many are middle-aged women who turn to dietary supplements that promise to burn fat or speed up weight loss.

That said, there are naive, or similar, teens who get their supplements for muscle building or whatever from dietary drinks, etc.

Now, there are some studies that show that modern Mass Agriculture has produced foodstuffs with less amount of vitamins and minerals per serving than in the past. However, those differences, which are likely at least somewhat valid, aren't so severe as to require megadoses of vitamins and minerals. And, claims such as "stress," re water-soluble vitamins? Our ancestors, trying to escape lions on the savannah, faced stress themselves. On fat-soluble vitamins vis-a-vis cardiovascular disease or other things? Many of the original claims for them have been shot down; taken in megadoses, even low enough to not be directly and acutely toxic, they can still be harmful.

And, that said, vitamins and minerals do have recognized nutritional value. And, they're inexpensive. That's not true of what most people think of when we talk about supplements. In general, they have no recognized value. And, per my Big Supplements phrase, they're as expensive as hell, in many cases. And, no, that's not hyperbole. For depression, for example, SAM-e can definitely cost more than a generic version of an old tricyclic antidepressant, and possibly more than a generic SSRI. Beyond that, what I said above? The claim of Big Supplements and their touters that any supplement offers a royal road to health, overcoming an illness or syndrome, etc.? It's a lie.

Meanwhile, let's not forget the myths about certain types of diets, above all, the "paleo diet." Dr. David Katz says that no specific diet is perfect, but that Michael Pollan's ideas are a great general guide. In other words, a high-carb diet is fine, as long as it's not processed, i.e, white flour and white rice and white flour noodles. Whole-wheat bread, brown rice, and whole wheat pasta, plus no canned veggies (way too much sodium), other canned or processed foods (sodium and sugar), and you'll be fine. The Mediterranean diet, as long as one uses whole-wheat pasta, is a good approximation.

As for the paleo diet, well, Katz notes that modern meat not only isn't an ancient mammoth, but it's "refined" with a grain diet (oops, how many paleos miss that) plus an overload of antibiotics and growth hormones. Plus, some meats are themselves "refined," like meats that are preserved with salt, sugar, or both (not to mention nitrates, etc.).

Paleo fail.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/12/22/3832809/spike-in-harm-to-liver-is-tied.html#storylink=cpy

Flight 370 update — likely correct, surely a week late

I agree with Malaysia's prime minister that Flight 370 is likely at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Or, technically, depending on how far south it flew, it may be at the bottom of the Southern Ocean.

Good luck finding wreckage. Anybody who's seen the Antarctica specials on PBS, March of the Penguins, etc., knows what the currents in the Southern Ocean are like. South of both Africa and Australia, with nothing to block their circumnavigation but Cape Horn, southern currents, like the winds, are fierce. Wreckage could be hundreds of miles away from being directly above where the wreck likely went down.

Here's the details:

The aircraft’s last known position, according to the analysis, “is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites,” (Prime Minister Najib Razak) said. “It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.” 

The new analysis of the flight path, the prime minister said, came from Inmarsat, the British company that provided the satellite data, and from Britain’s air safety agency. The company had “used a type of analysis never before used in an investigation of this sort,” he said. ...

(Chris McLaughlin, a vice president at Inmarsat) said that Inmarsat was confident enough in the new analysis, which it reviewed with Boeing and with a number of independent aviation experts, that it submitted its findings on Sunday to the Malaysians by way of the British safety agency, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch.

Per the currents part, even before you're out of the Indian Ocean and into the Southern Ocean?

Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales who studies and has conducted experiments on the flow of water around Australia, said currents in the southern Indian ocean could scatter floating debris in very different directions.

“The whole ocean down there is like a pinball machine,” Dr. van Sebille said. “It is difficult to track or predict where water goes, or do what is really important now, which is to backtrack where water came from.”

Dr. van Sebille described the conditions of the southern Indian Ocean as “extremely hostile,” with large waves, swirling currents and winds that are among the strongest on the planet.

“The longer it takes, the harder it will be to backtrack those pieces of debris,” he said.

Yep. And, thus, harder to find ocean-floor wreckage, and the black boxes that could tell us why this happened.

And, on that front:

The United States Pacific Command said on Monday that it would move a Towed Pinger Locator System, capable of locating a black box to a depth of 20,000 feet, into the region. “This movement is simply a prudent effort to pre-position equipment and trained personnel closer to the search area, so that if debris is found, we will be able to respond as quickly as possible, since the battery life of the black box’s pinger is limited," Cmdr. Chris Budde, a Seventh Fleet operations officer, said in an email statement.

That said, contra Faux News' wingnuts, and somewhat contra Ted Rall, we can probably rule out terrorism but not absolutely. A cockpit hijack attempt, with a struggle between captain and first officer, is possible, but even then, even if we do find the black box, it can tell us only so much. Unless Malaysia is more forthcoming about its search of the home computer and flight simulator of Cpt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, we won't know much on motive, if this indeed is what happened.

And, if Malaysia could have done anything sooner to speed up Inmarsat's work?

That's the "week too late" part. Without various forms of Malaysian obfuscation, we probably could have had Inmarsat get crunching numbers, and spitting out results, sooner than it did, and focusing the wreckage search earlier, before it got scattered from here to hell and back.

Anyway, I'll stand by what I said a week ago; I expect it to take much longer to find floor wreckage from this flight than the Air France flight of 2009.

Wrong pitching decision, #Cardinals

Do the St. Louis Cardinals really need that much bullpen help that Carlos Martinez is getting stuffed in the pen, while Joe Kelly, whom I see as, well, as junior Lance Lynn, is the fifth starter? Even if the team theoretically needs that help now, April has a number of days off. Plus, Jason Motte, aka Yukon Cornelius, could be ready for a bullpen slot by the end of May.

And, if John Mozeliak really, really believes the value of an eighth-inning setup man is more important than a starter, even a No. 5, he needs to hand in the "Sabermetric Genius" badge he found in his box of CrackerJack.

True, per Strauss, this will limit Martinez' innings pitched, as the team wants and it is a case where missing Jaime Garcia hurts. But, if you want him to start later in the year, if we're past early May, then he theoretically has to go down to Memphis to get back into "starter mode." (Also, even though he pitched much less than a full year in St. Louis last year, Michael Wacha is not on an innings limit this year.)

I would rather he'd start from the start, that Kelly would be used to "spot" him on occasion early in the year to stretch out Martinez's 170-inning limit, along with "pulling" him early from some of his stasrts and we go from there. 

Or, if not, I'd rather that, if Mozeliak and Mike Matheny, for some strange reason, don't want to start Martinez right now, they send him back to Memphis, and then bring him back up.

This isn't a horrible decision. It's not a fantastic one, though. And, no, I don't totally believe Mo that this decision was the result of "healthy debate." It may have been the result of Matheny actually doing some head-scratching, but not vigorously enough to change Mo's mind, or Mo's eyeballs on Martinez's arbitration clock or whatever.

And, per Bernie Miklasz, this wasn't a real competition in the first place. Whichever one of the two, Mo or Matheny, was most pretending it was? Now, we're at last year's "Where's Shelby Miller" postseason contretemps. Once again, you have a manager and a GM who are proving themselves to simply be untrustworthy on the field of public relations with personnel decisions, at least pitching ones. And, speaking of Bernie, is this too part of the "Cardinal Way"?

And, speaking of Lance Lynn, as I've blogged before, I really wish Mo would make him part of a trade package for David Price.

#Cosmos, creationists and Fox

I love it that creationists continue to whine about Cosmos (even as host Neil deGrasse Tyson blew it on Giordano Bruno).

That said, creationists, as part of the Religious Right, getting taken for a ride by Fox, aka Faux, and owner Rupert Murdoch is nothing new; just this round of complaining is.

Hasn't "The Simpsons" been a bastion of anti-authoritarianism for more than a decade? For several years, wasn't "Married with Children" arguably one of the best anti-family arguments you could have, not to mention one of the earliest entrees in Faux's general degrading of commercial network TV with yet more T&A suggestiveness, a bit more lewdness in language, and other things?

And, where was the Religious Right then? They were already mute, for the most part, even before Faux News made their wet dreams come true by slanting news the way they wanted.

So, suck it, creationists. This time, Murdoch's ride to the bank with your money is a bit more blatant, but not at all new.

Besides, creationists, Comedy Central's got your airtime right here.

That said, Fox is also laughing at you Cosmos geeks, rooting for "Team Science" in a knockoff of the original that apparently isn't sure whether children or adults are its primary target (the original was adult-focused), all while Fox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, or both, are laughing to the bank with a boatload of commercials and cheesy animation that's riding your tribalism for all it's worth.

#ExxonValdez — remembering 25 years

One dead whale in Prince William Sound, 1989, via Exxon.
AP photo via Houston Chronicle

In the spring of 1989, I was in the first full year of graduate divinity school. I still belonged to, and believed in the tenets of, a fundamentalist Lutheran church. (No, family and friends, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod doesn't fit a narrower definition of Christian fundamentalists, but it does fit nicely in a broader sociology of religion definition.)

Anyway, I digress.

I was also, for the most part, still steeped in my parents' political beliefs, between my dad's Eisenhower-Main Street conservativism (with his twinge of Eisenhower-Main Street racism), and my mom's "None Dare Call It Treason" moving to Art Bell-listening Tea Party progenitorship (as I know with that anecdotal proof positive that the Tea Party idea is nothing new).

Anyway, again I digress.

I was already a bit of an environmentalist, at least in the sense of believing that Christian creationism did imply some sort of "good stewardship." And I was moving a bit beyond that, even.

Then, a seemingly drunken captain, Joseph Hazelwood, sailing a past-its-due-date, environmentally inadequate oil tanker, ran it aground on Alaskan rocks. And caused a massive animal die-off and other problems for which eXXXon (that's the correct spelling, folks) still refuses to admit full responsibility today.

That includes full financial responsibility, getting punitive damages cut to 10 percent of the original award due to "quirks" in maritime common law, per Wikipedia. And, since then? I've not seen either major party make major changes to environmental civil law to increase punitive damages for "takings" of reducing environmental and scenic value.

As for me? I took the next steps toward becoming a real environmentalist. (In the next five years, I took a chunk of steps toward becoming a real secularist [I avoid the Big A label, as much at times due to some Big As as well as Christian fundamentalists] and becoming a real liberal. By the end of the 1990s, I had moved beyond the Democratic Party, in fact and fortunately.) As part of that, I also became even more of an environmentalist, and a more activist one.

Indeed, while I had the pleasure of living in the Dallas area for most of the first decade of this century, I even "visited" a couple of eXXXon's annual shareholder meetings, as you can see. 

And, per the poster, we had even more to protest against eXXXon by 2008, or earlier. Since then, eXXXon has continued to be just as responsible of a corporate citizen on global warming and climate change, and now on oil and gas fracking, as it was on the Exxon Valdez. So eXXXon is the gift that keeps on giving.

And, in more ways than one. Per Wikipedia's story on the disaster, when in the original suit, eXXXon was hit with $5 billion in punitive damages, it got a $4.8 billion line of credit from J.P. Morgan. To insulate itself, Morgan created the first modern credit default swap.

In other words, eXXXon's Alaskan oil slick helped crap on the American economy nearly 20 years later. That said, why would anything about any unholy alliance between Wall Street and Big Oil surprise you? See: "Bros., Koch" for more.

Meanwhile, as High Country News notes, eXXXon's "cleanup" wasn't. There's still officially 21,000 gallons of oil in Prince William Sound and unofficially, much more.

===

And Perry reminds us, in light of the Houston Ship Channel collision over the weekend, that things haven't changed a lot. That includes the damage to wildlife, not just the inconvenience to the modern economy.