Dan Fink

Ex-journalist, Sixers fan, dad - not necessarily in that order. “The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.” Robert F. Kennedy

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@mudhafakah @tlantabraves @mariana057 Wham! Just got it.

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

Why is it called ‘pickleball’?

In 1965, Joel Pritchard of Washington State was bored on vacation.

So, he and his friends made up a game using a badminton court, table tennis paddles, and a perforated plastic ball.
🧵⬇️

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@StephenJ_Caruso This is a district where Rs have a 2-1 registration margin. To have the margin in single digits is an overperformance. And there will be a rematch in November.

[Julian ☽ @julianblacks_]

This is going to be long.

Last semester I suspected I had a major issue with use of AI in my survey courses, so I inserted what is known as a trojan horse (not the virus kind) into the directions of a paper assignment. As it turned out, I did in fact have a major problem, and a post on Threads about it accidentally went quasi-viral and ultimately became a Huffington Post article and an NPR interview. (Links at the end)

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@SixersAdam Good work here. Fair and well sourced.

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@fmch6444 @tomjcrane @mccaffreyr3 You are correct, Florida. There is plenty of supporting evidence. Lee managed the Custis slaves from 1857 to 1862, according to the National Park Service, and was a brutal slave master.

[Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD DSc(hon) @PeterHotez]

1/n: I could be wrong, of course, but my take about this hantavirus outbreak is less about the actual outbreak and more about what it means in the context of the last two decades and moving forward. Let me explain...

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@hwinkler4real @LePapillonBlu2 @MAGACult2 I think you mean, “Aaaay”

[Michael Harriot @michaelharriot]

This program is based on the "white genocide" conspiracy that Black South Africans are planning to rise up and kill white property owners

It's impossible to explain how infuriating this story is without telling 1 of the greatest stories in all of Black history.

A thread

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@sreinert6685 @SurfNTurfCorey @ZBerm @JourdanRodrigue Please. Milton Williams, Nakobe Dean, Avonte Maddox, Big V, Kenny Gainwell, Sweat, Blankenship. All third round or later. He does fine. Better than most.

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@BowTiedSabe @VinnysCorner1 This was the one I thought of.

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@godhandkali @redhotnerd @MrTibblesNewEra While the main character in the song is a Vietnam war vet, the song also calls out the loss of well-paying blue collar jobs caused by corporations shutting down factories and moving jobs offshore.

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@tjmcaulay Lots of outrage here about the possibility of a ref deciding a game with a T. Not so much for the coach unable to manage his emotions and deciding to make actual contact with an official.

[Mallory McMorrow @MalloryMcMorrow]

The cost of your flight went up because you searched for it twice. Your rideshare costs more because your phone battery is dying.

This is surveillance pricing – corporations using your own data and behaviors against you.

In the US Senate, I’ve got a plan to ban it.

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@Microinteracti1 Live shot of Trump preparing for his next overseas trip.

[Clint Hurdle @ClintHurdle13]

During one of the worst losing streaks of my career, our team president walked into my office.

Keli McGregor. One of the best men I've ever known.

He could have come to vent. To question my decisions. To ask hard questions.

Instead, he said: "Cut to the chase, Clint. What's next?"

I looked him in the eye and gave him two words: "Shower well."

The Colorado Rockies were struggling badly that year.

Pregame preparation was solid. Scout meetings, early work, attention to detail. All of it was there.

But at game time, the tires were flat.

I told Keli: the game did everything it could to us today. We just couldn't meet its demands.

Now it was time to reset.

"Shower well" means exactly this:
• Watch the frustration circle down the drain
• Shampoo, rinse, repeat and get the grime of today completely off your mind
• Walk out clean, go home, and actually rest

Leave it at the ballpark. The game is over. There's nothing left to solve tonight.

Keli nodded. Asked if he could share it with the whole organization.

I said sure. And then it hit me. This isn't just for baseball.

Bad day at the office. Grumpy boss. Missed deadline. Traffic on the way home.

You can carry all of that through your front door.

Or you can shower well.

I've never seen a single problem get better because someone dragged it home with them.

The reset is a discipline. Same as preparation. Same as showing up.

Either we win. Or we learn.

The only real loss? When you don't take a single thing out of a hard day.

So tonight, whatever kind of day it was, shower well.

Tomorrow is a new at-bat.

What does your reset look like? I'd love to hear it.

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@garykoepnick @Alan_Clinard Also: “But in light of the defendants' conduct, its lack of a presence in the U.S. and the risk of exposing law enforcement tools and techniques, "it is no longer in the best interests of justice or the country's national security to continue this prosecution."”

[Gary Koepnick @garykoepnick]

Just going to keep posting this to counter the ridiculous bullshit until someone makes me stop.

The Special Counsel investigation uncovered extensive criminal activity
•The investigation produced 37 indictments; seven guilty pleas or convictions; and compelling evidence that the president obstructed justice on multiple occasions. Mueller also uncovered and referred 14 criminal matters to other components of the Department of Justice.
•Trump associates repeatedly lied to investigators about their contacts with Russians, and President Trump refused to answer questions about his efforts to impede federal proceedings and influence the testimony of witnesses.
•A statement signed by over 1,000 former federal prosecutors concluded that if any other American engaged in the same efforts to impede federal proceedings the way Trump did, they would likely be indicted for multiple charges of obstruction of justice.

Russia engaged in extensive attacks on the U.S. election system in 2016
•Russian interference in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic.”[1]
•Major attack avenues included a social media “information warfare” campaign that “favored” candidate Trump[2] and the hacking of Clinton campaign-related databases and release of stolen materials through Russian-created entities and Wikileaks.[3]
•Russia also targeted databases in many states related to administering elections gaining access to information for millions of registered voters.[4]

The investigation “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign” and established that the Trump Campaign “showed interest in WikiLeaks's releases of documents and welcomed their potential to damage candidate Clinton” 
•In 2015 and 2016, Michael Cohen pursued a hotel/residence project in Moscow on behalf of Trump while he was campaigning for President.[5]Then-candidate Trump personally signed a letter of intent.
•Senior members of the Trump campaign, including Paul Manafort, Donald Trump, Jr., and Jared Kushner took a June 9, 2016, meeting with Russian nationals at Trump Tower, New York, after outreach from an intermediary informed Trump, Jr., that the Russians had derogatory information on Clinton that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”[6]
•Beginning in June 2016, a Trump associate “forecast to senior [Trump] Campaign officials that WikiLeaks would release information damaging to candidate Clinton.”[7] A section of the Report that remains heavily redacted suggests that Roger Stone was this associate and that he had significant contacts with the campaign about Wikileaks.[8]
•The Report described multiple occasions where Trump associates lied to investigators about Trump associate contacts with Russia. Trump associates George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, Michael Flynn, and Michael Cohen all admitted that they made false statements to federal investigators or to Congress about their contacts. In addition, Roger Stone faces trial this fall for obstruction of justice, five counts of making false statements, and one count of witness tampering.
•The Report contains no evidence that any Trump campaign official reported their contacts with Russia or WikiLeaks to U.S. law enforcement authorities during the campaign or presidential transition, despite public reports on Russian hacking starting in June 2016 and candidate Trump’s August 2016 intelligence briefing warning him that Russia was seeking to interfere in the election.
•The Report raised questions about why Trump associates and then-candidate Trump repeatedly asserted Trump had no connections to Russia.[9]

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Dan Fink @DanielCFink]

@Dr_TheHistories