Thursday August 6, 2026
A New League of Their Own
On August 1, the Women’s Pro Baseball League held the game of its inaugural season, the Los Angeles Queens beating the New York Heights 10 to 8. The league was the brainchild of Justine Siegel, the first female coach in the MLB, and Keith Stein, co-owner of the Canadian Baseball League’s Toronto Maple Leafs, with the intent of increasing the visibility of women’s baseball. The games are all being broadcast on ESPN Select.
This first season features four teams: in addition to the Queens and Heights there are the Boston Hunters and the San Francisco Firebells. The games are all being played at a neutral site in Springfield, Illinois from August to September. Over 600 women tried out for the league from around 25 countries. An notable draftee, now playing for the Los Angeles Queens, is Mo’ne Davis who in 2014 was the first girl to throw a shutout in the Little League World Series.
Throwing out the first pitch on August 1 was 99 year old Maybelle Blair. She played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League made famous by the movie A League of Their Own.
Wednesday August 5, 2026
More Musings on My Family's Past
Sometime between 1860 and 1870, according to census data, my paternal grandmother’s family shifted from being farm laborers to working in the textile industry. (Her mother Augusta’s father was a loom overseer by 1871; she married a municipal printer.) Unfortunately she died young, and had only two daughters. (My grandmother’s half-sister Lily was the mother of Dilys, who wrote out this family tree on the back of a dairy calendar. There was a big family feud I’ve never understood and anyone who ever knew about it is now dead, but my father and Dilys became quite close at the end and we invited her to my first wedding.)
I dip into genealogy on a very sporadic basis but at the moment I’m glad, because it turns out my siblings and I definitely qualify for Canadian citizenship since our maternal grandfather was born in Toronto, and I have a lot of the documentation required to prove it. Kind of collecting passports, says Numenius…
Tuesday August 4, 2026
Voting Out Of Spite
In November 2018 I went to the national convention of Reconstructing Judaism, which is the organization behind the Jewish denomination I am involved with, Reconstructionism. On the last day of the convention, there was a keynote talk by Andy Levin who was and is an active member of his Reconstructionist congregation in Michigan and who had just been elected to Congress for his first time. It was a good talk, full of hope and ideas and progressive values.
His tenure in Congress lasted four years. In 2022 he was primaried out of office. Running against him was Haley Stevens who had received 4.5 million dollars in funding from AIPAC. They were opposed to Levin because in Levin’s words: “AIPAC can’t stand the idea that I am the clearest, strongest Jewish voice in Congress standing for a simple proposition: that there is no way to have a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people unless we achieve the political and human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Today Haley Stevens is running in a primary to be Michigan senator against Abdel El-Sayed. El-Sayed is a progressive, Stevens is a moderate. Stevens continues to receive AIPAC money, with about $30 million flowing into her campaign. But AIPAC is now a dirty word among Democratic voters, and Stevens has been trailing badly in the polls. She has also been ramping up the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry in her campaign. (There are far too many politicians in the Democratic Party who are bigoted in that way).
I find it really rich that Stevens who is not Jewish is claiming the mantle of defending the interests of Jewish Americans when she vindictively primaried Levin in 2022.
There are strategic reasons for voting for Stevens — she polls better against the Republican nominee in the general election than El-Sayed — but were I in Michigan, I would vote for El-Sayed out of spite.
Monday August 3, 2026
A Textile Center
Blackburn had been a wool weaving centre since the mid 13th century, with handlooms in houses providing much of the wool needed for trade especially following the settlement of Flemish weavers in the area. During the Industrial Revolution Blackburn’s population went from 5,000 to over 130,000. (The spinning jenny was invented a few miles away, driving the need for machine looms to turn Blackburn into the “weaving capital of the world.”) My grandmother’s family moved from just east of the Pennines to Blackburn; my grandmother worked in the cotton mills as early as age 15.
Housing for this population explosion was often provided by the mills. But what was it like? Small, cramped, damp. The Victorians could expect to lose a third of their children before they reached adulthood; how much higher would that figure have been when adjusted for these kinds of conditions? My grandmother had two surviving sisters and one brother, all of them living in a two-bedroom townhouse. The idea of laundry in a time before washing machines, in a part of the country where it ALWAYS rained and where the only indoor source of heat was a coal fire, makes me shudder. (I hung a full load of laundry outside yesterday; much of it was almost dry before I finished hanging it. California summers… And yet, most Davisites dry their clothes in a dryer. Not sure why.)
But this is where my grandfather’s family comes in: my great-grandfather was a plumber. Outhouses were common through the 1950s in this part of the world but indoor water supply needed installing, and plumbing provided the answer. Terry Pratchett’s Dodger is a fun glimpse into the rise of sanitation practices in London, but the extensive sewers put in by the Romans had no equivalent in smaller towns in the north.
Sunday August 2, 2026
Farmers Market at 50
Yesterday the Davis Farmers Market celebrated its 50th anniversary. We had a sketchcrawl at the market for the event. I didn’t stay long at the sketchcrawl, but did complete the sketch at left.
Saturday August 1, 2026
The Blackburn Side
The piece I wrote on rhoticity in the northwest of England has had me pondering a bit about my father’s origins, origins he was so eager to leave behind. His father and grandfather were freemasons, which I imagine isn’t especially high among the reasons he wanted to leave (the weather, narrow-mindedness and lack of modern conveniences such as showers and central heating were certainly much higher on the list), but he was well educated in this old mill town and to his death he loved Blackburn Rovers, living to see them become Premier League champions in 1995.
Over the next few days I’m going to be focusing on his family of origin. What was life in this bleak town like in 1931, the date on this certificate? What was life like for my grandmother, who I last saw in the Blackburn Royal Infirmary in Blackburn in 1965? And how does the city make its way now, in the post-cotton mill era?
Friday July 31, 2026
The Sport of Kings
This past Tuesday FIFA president Gianni Infantino shocked the world by proposing to sell off partial rights to the World Cup to private investors, creating a $20 billion company to run the tournament. It was only slightly more shocking that the probable head of the investment group would be a member of Trump’s extended family, Jared Kushner’s brother.
Back in January I blogged about the concept of neo-royalism, which was receiving a lot of discussion at that time. This concept comes from a couple of international relations scholars, Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman. To summarize the concept, it is generally understood that the liberal international order is in decline. To replace it, many think that the system is falling back to what came beforehand, a “Westphalian great power system”, with each state looking out for its own interests. Goddard and Newman propose instead we are transitioning to an older analogue that they term “neo-royalism”, a system that “centers on ruling cliques, networks of political, capital, and military elites devoted to individual sovereigns, seeking to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes.”.
Infantino’s actions fit the neo-royalist model to a T. Infantino is trying to enter into the world of ruling cliques and be on top of his own network of tributes. He is attempting to buy agreement on the private investment plan by promising each of the 211 national football associations a one-time payment of $40 million if they vote for it. He has been ingratiating himself with Trump for a while —- this is surely the reason for presenting Trump with the “FIFA Peace Prize”. He frequently interacts with the Middle Eastern oil monarchs —- hence the 2022 Qatar World Cup and the upcoming World Cup in Saudi Arabia in 2034 —- and yesterday he met with King Mohammed VI of Morocco. Infantino is also trying to set himself up to be a power broker after his term as FIFA president ends —- he would be deeply involved with this investment group.
It is now clear that Infantino has been acting on his own accord, and the private investment proposal did not come from some upper-level FIFA cabal. Miguel Delaney writing for The Independent on Thursday reported that there are claims that Infantino’s inner circle did not even know about it, with one advisor describing this as Infantino “going rogue”. Today it was reported that FIFA’s chief operating officer said that staff were “deceived” over the project and that it has been the action of one person.
Fortunately, it looks like Infantino has overreached. The European confederation UEFA quickly opposed the proposal and in an emergency meeting on Thursday they decided that UEFA members would boycott any and all FIFA competitions until the proposal is off the table. CONCACAF (the North and Central American confederation) and AFC (the Asian confederation) have also rejected the proposal. With nations from those three confederations rejecting it, the proposal will not have the votes to pass.
Would such a network centered around Infantino and the investors be big enough to be seen as a neo-royalist power? FIFA does not generate tech giant-sized revenue but there is a lot of money flowing through it — one article says it received revenue of $13 billion over the 2023-2026 World Cup cycle. And football is the most popular sport on the planet, with the World Cup being the biggest single sporting event. This cultural capital is a tempting resource for the ruling elite.
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Update, 6:15 PM PDT 31 July 2026. Infantino has scrapped the proposal. The growing backlash may yet be large enough to sink his presidency.
Thursday July 30, 2026
Wednesday July 29, 2026
Chaco Canyon Public Comment
I have started the practice of submitting public comments on contentious agency proposals, as I shared earlier with my comment on proposed changes by the Office of Management and Budget to the federal funding process . Yesterday I submitted another comment, this time on a plan by the Bureau of Land Management to revoke protections adopted during the Biden administration for a 10-mile buffer surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. This plan would open this area to oil, gas, and mineral extraction. Here is a good overview of the controversy.
As I did with the OMB proposal, I am sharing the text of my comment below.
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I strongly oppose the proposed revocation of Public Land Order 7923, the public lands withdrawal surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park. This proposed revocation is described in the July 2026 BLM environmental assessment document DOI-BLM-NM-F010-2026-0002-EA, hereafter referred to as the BLM document.
The Chaco Canyon landscape is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It has outstanding cultural and natural value to humanity as a whole. It is one of only 23 such sites in the United States. In 1972 the United States was the first to ratify the international treaty to preserve such sites for humanity. The Chaco Canyon cultural landscape extends well beyond the boundaries of the National Historical Park (NHP). It is a landscape sacred to the Pueblo peoples who live in the area. According to the BLM document, there are at least 145 traditional cultural properties including 9 great houses within the 10 mile buffer surrounding the NHP.
The BLM document itself states that “the Pueblo tribes view the Chacoan landscape as an integrated cultural system spanning northwest New Mexico and beyond, not a collection of isolated sites. They see its network of roads and interconnected communities as reflective of a society that thrived through regional connections rather than isolation…Maintaining this landscape is considered important by the Pueblo tribes for its cultural and historical integrity.” (Page 28).
The proposed revocation has been a travesty of public process. In April 2026 BLM opened a public scoping period for only seven days. This was entirely online with no in-person meetings. Despite the short window, BLM received over 100,000 comments, but Appendix E of the BLM document intentionally omits any summary of the content of these comments. The window to comment on the present BLM document is almost as short, only 14 days.
This dismissal of public input contrasts strikingly with the process that led to the issuance of PLO 7923 in 2023, which took a year-and-a-half with eight public meetings and a 120-day public comment period which elicited over 110,000 comments, all of which followed a decade of public engagement by Tribal groups such as the All Pueblo Council of Governors.
There is no justification in the BLM document for overturning this extended public process that led to the creation of PLO 7923, other than referring vaguely to the executive orders EO 14241 and SO 3418. By the analysis presented in the BLM document, the economic benefits of oil, gas, and mineral development within the NHP 10-mile buffer would be extremely modest. The analysis estimates that only 14 jobs would be created across the four county region over a twenty-year period.
But the BLM document fails to analyze possible economic losses to the region that might result from reduced visitation to Chaco Culture NHP as a result of destruction of the buffer lands. As an example, Chaco Culture NHP is renowned as a dark sky site for public astronomy. (See the Chaco Culture NHP webpage at https://www.nps.gov/chcu/planyourvisit/nightsky.htm.) The BLM document acknowledges (Appendix C, AIB-11) the potential for increased sky glow as a result of development of the buffer zone. Brighter skies means less reason for amateur astronomers to visit the NHP. More generally, the failure to study impacts to the recreational economy of the region as a result of buffer zone development is a substantial weakness of the BLM economic analysis.
The cultural landscape surrounding Chaco Canyon dating back at least 1200 years is a treasure for all Americans. Any development in the vicinity would irrevocably disrupt the integrity of the landscape, all for a few dollars worth of energy resources seized in an unethical affront to the public engagement process. I urge BLM to keep Public Land Order 7923 as it stands.
Tuesday July 28, 2026
In Praise of Public Transport
A friend of mine is flying to Germany today. We met at the Mexican restaurant kitty-corner from the railway station for lunch before she left. It’s now possible to get to San Francisco International Airport by taking the train from Davis to Richmond, switching to BART there and boarding a subway train that stops basically inside the international terminal.
Resources for public transport are always under tremendous stress. Improvements tend not to be lucrative for the local governments that implement them, but they do improve the quality of life of the citizens they serve. I’ve driven others to and from SFO and it’s not a lot of fun; there is always a lot of traffic on the Bay Bridge. So much better to hop on a train, spare the air, spare the aggravation.
These are the kinds of factors that are brushed aside in the name of efficiency…