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Dave Sullivan places his ballot in a ballot box outside of the downtown Spokane Library on Monday, Nov. 7, 2016. COLIN MULVANY colinm@spokesman.com (Colin Mulvany / The Spokesman-Review)

If you havent voted yet and I dont have to be Carnac the Magnificent to know most of you havent it might be because you dont know enough about those unfamiliar names on the primary ballot.

An off-year election like Tuesdays primary is the kind that frequently draws new blood to the body politic. If Congress and the White House campaigns represent the Major Leagues of politics, city council and school board primaries might be like the Spokane Indians.

Most of these candidates will never make an appearance in the political equivalent of Safeco Field, but that doesnt mean they arent worth checking out now.

That can be more difficult than last year, when newspapers, airwaves and social media were overflowing with election coverage. But there is a website that will give Spokane-area voters some useful background information on candidates for municipal office.

CandidateVerification.org is a nonprofit with a bipartisan board, many of them veterans of different political battles. It asks candidates to submit to the kind of background checks that any employer might do on a potential employee a multi-state criminal check going back 10 years, a nationwide check of sex offender registries, plus county and federal civil records. It also verifies any education and employment history a candidate lists on a resume.

When the checks come back, the candidate is asked to give permission for the group to post the results online.

Lots of organizations ask candidates to supply information or fill out questionnaires, and the response is often spotty. Republican candidates dont respond to left-leaning groups and Democrats ignore right-leaning ones. And some candidates get so many questionnaires they refuse to do any.

By itself, CandidateVerification has no clout, Executive Director David Doud said. But a diverse array of groups rely on its background checks enough that candidates seeking support are either required or encouraged to sign up.

Its the pressure of our partners that really drives the process, Doud said.

That includes groups as different as the Spokane Home Builders and Spokane Realtors, faith-based We Believe We Vote, and Amplify, the new name for Progressive Majority of Washington.

Arthur Whitten, of the Home Builders, said the group requires a background check before it will endorse a candidate, and finds them especially helpful this year.

There are so many of these first-time candidates, he said. Its like endorsement insurance for our members.

Penny Lancaster, of We Believe We Vote, said the organization doesnt require it, but does recommend candidates get the background check. Those who do get extra credit in its rundown of where they stand on key issues. We appreciate what they are doing, she said.

E.J. Juarez, of Amplify, said they encourage candidates, especially new ones, to get the background checks so they know whats out there. The checks can reveal small mistakes in their resume, like a date thats off for an education certificate or job they held. It can also let a candidate know that information about a bankruptcy or that they dropped out of college could come up in a campaign.

Its not a game of gotcha, Juarez said. Its about helping people put their best foot forward and be honest with voters.

CandidateVerification has been concentrating on Spokane races lately, so its 2017 database currently has many of the primary candidates for local municipal offices as well as a smattering of other Eastern Washington candidates. They have to draw the line there, Doud said, because at $100 to $200 per background check, they dont have the money for school board or fire commissioner candidates. All their money comes from donations.

Doud hopes to grow the database in the period between the primary and the November general election.

The Spokesman-Review has compiled all of its coverage of the primary races in its Election Center. Go to http://www.spokesman.com and click on Election 2017 in the box just a little way down from the top of the page.

Spokane County Elections also has an online voter guide for primary candidates.

How did I know that most people reading this column havent cast their primary ballot?

Well, it mightve been an educated guess based on the fact primary elections in off years always have more people who dont vote than people who do. I could have gone with that under the not my first rodeo rule of political science.

But being a responsible journalist, I checked with the Spokane County Elections Office on Friday afternoon. It was reporting less than 14 percent of the ballots it sent out have come back.

Blaming the low numbers on a lack of information may be overly charitable. But it sounds better than saying voters are too lazy to put down their chilled beverage, get out of the hammock and mark the ballot.

Ballots must either be postmarked or deposited in a drop box by 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Read more here:
Spin Control: Washington group checks candidate backgrounds for voters - The Spokesman-Review

MECCA: Malaysian haj pilgrims need not worry about moving around the Masjidil Haram (Grand Mosque) to perform religious rituals and acts of worship as the situation in the holy city is safe and under control.

Deputy Head of Malaysian Haj Delegation (Welfare) 2017, Nurrin Anuwar Shamsuddin said Tabung Haji (TH) had been working closely with the Malaysian Embassy in Riyadh and Consulate General in Jeddah to keep tabs of the situation and so far, no warning notice was issued to the pilgrims.

"The situation in Mecca is still under control, pilgrims are free to move around the Masjidil Haram ... no restriction so far.

"To all their families (in Malaysia), don't worry. InsyaAllah, everything is alright and under control," he told the Malaysian media at the Mecca TH headquarters at the Abraj AlJanadriyah Hotel here, Saturday.

Malaysia has condemned the attempted missile attack aimed at the holy city of Mecca and hope that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a statement on Friday said the abhorrent act, reportedly launched by Yemen's Houthi rebels, could threaten the safety of pilgrims.

The Saudi Defence Forces on Thursday (July 27) intercepted a ballistic missile, known as 'Burkan-1', 69km away from Mecca at Al-Wasliya area of Yaif Province.

According to international media reports, the Houthis on Friday confirmed the launch of a Burkan-1 ballistic missile into Saudi Arabia but said it targeted King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, the kingdom's busiest airport. No casualties were reported as a result of the attack.

Meanwhile, Nurrin Anuwar also advised the Malaysian pilgrims to follow the schedules set by the TH and to be on high alert of their surroundings.

"Alhamdulilah, TH is proud to say that Malaysian pilgrims are among the best in terms of discipline, knowledge and following instructions as long as they adhere to all instructions, they will be fine.

"If there is an incident or rally, stay away! We are here to perform religious obligation, so let's just focus on doing that," he said.

Nurrin Anuwar said the TH also had its own patrol team to monitor security of Malaysian haj pilgrims in the holy city.

"Our patrol team members have experience working with security forces and they know how to assess the situation out there," he added. Bernama

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Security in Mecca under control: TH - The Sun Daily

Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, is getting into the magazine business.

David Bradley, owner of the Atlantic, said he is selling majority control of the 160-year-old publication to Emerson Collective, a not-for-profit institute that is controlled by Powell Jobs.

The deal involves only the Atlantic magazine, founded four years before the start of the Civil War. The other properties that are part of Atlantic Media including conferences and the National Journal, Quartz, and Government Executive will be retained by Bradleys company.

I want to let you know that I am entering into a partnership with Emerson Collective, the business and philanthropic venture of Laurene Powell Jobs, Bradley wrote in a memo to staffers Friday.

Bradley is 64 and said that none of his three children had expressed interest in taking over the magazine. The plan calls for Powell Jobs and the Emerson Collective to eventually acquire full control. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Bradley took over the then-Boston-based publication from real estate developer and Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman for $10 million in 1999. It lost money every year Zuckerman owned it and was losing money for many years before that.

Bradley moved it to Washington, DC, and made a big push into digital offerings. The magazine reversed years of financial misery and started posting a profit about three years ago. Today, the magazine and its related properties derive only about 20 percent of its total revenue from print.

Against the odds, The Atlantic is prospering, Bradley said in the memo. While I will stay at the helm some years, the most consequential decision of my career now is behind me: Who next will take stewardship of this 160-year-old national treasure? To me, the answer, in the form of Laurene, feels incomparably right.

Bradley said he will stay on as chairman of the Atlantic magazine for three to five years.

Peter Lattman, a former media editor at the New York Times and now managing director at Palo Alto-based Emerson Collective, will be adding the title of vice chairman of Atlantic and will operate out of its New York offices, where the publication has sales and video production.

The editorial office is expected to remain in Washington and Jeffrey Goldberg and Bob Cohn are expected to remain as editor-in-chief and president, respectively, under new ownership.

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Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow, makes splashy media deal - New York Post

Since the Enlightenment, champions of progress have urged us to break free of the chains of tradition.

Just because "we've always done it this way," is no reason to keep doing it this way. It is irrational, it is dumb, indeed, it is frequently dishonest, to cling to traditions, they say. If we aim to understand the world and control it the abiding ambition of all empirically minded thinkers then surely we can dispense with the baggage of inherited convention.

Keith Law has just published a book that explores this question. The book is opinionated and it is sparked by fury. Indeed, Law writes as one who speaks truth to power. It is written by someone who thinks of himself as at the vanguard, the revolutionary forefront.

It is now possible, he insists, indeed, it is now mandatory, that we use mathematical analysis and statistics not only to evaluate human achievement, but also to learn how to predict it in the future.

I exaggerate maybe just a little bit.

Law's book is about the use of statistics in baseball. And while his assault on the Old Ways is driven by a real sense of outrage at the way irrational tradition shackles progressive thinking, he confines himself, by and large, to bad thinking in the domain of baseball. It is baseball he wants us to learn to think right about.

Law is a writer at ESPN and his his book, published in April, is called Smart Baseball: The Story Behind The Old Stats That Are Ruining The Game, The New Ones That Are Running It, And The Right Way To Think About Baseball.

For Law, the "old stats" are ruining the game. Batting Average, for example, is a terrible measure of a batter's offensive "value," since it considers hits-per-at-bat. This is doubly wrong-headed, he contends: It ignores the fact that not all hits are created equally (a home run is worth more than a single), and it disregards the batter's offensive achievements (e.g. walks), which don't happen during at bats (since not all plate appearances count as at bats). Likewise, Runs Batted In is not only uninformative about how good a player is offensively, it is dishonest, for it confuses his accomplishments with those of his teammates, Law says. You can only drive batters in, after all, if there are runners on base to be driven in.

Or consider the evaluation of pitching performance by wins; this is even more outrageous, he says. You can only win if your team scores, and the pitcher has no control over that. The idea that it is the pitcher who wins is premised on the idea that good pitchers have a kind of magic that leads their teams to victory. And that, Law is certain, is so much nonsense. Praising an individual player for results over which he has nothing resembling control isn't very bright. It isn't going to help you figure out what's really going on on the field, and might very well lead you to make bad baseball decisions.

We use statistics, Law holds, to evaluate performance. We want to understand what a player actually does on the field, and we want to predict likely performance going forward. We need objectivity to do this. We need data. We need metrics that cut through the noise to the reality. The last thing we need are old fashioned prejudices about pitchers winning games and RBI being a measure of a player's offensive value to his team, he says.

Can we do what Law and his fellow "quants" demand? Can we use numbers to assign value, to sort through praise and blame, and to ground baseball decisions in matters of value-neutral fact? I get it that this is something baseball executives want. Michael Lewis explained in Moneyball that the new statistics make it possible to discover sources of baseball value that traditional thinking has tended to ignore. And I get it that if you're a player, or a manager, or a fan, the problem of evaluating and predicting is of the greatest importance.

But is it actually possible, in baseball, or in life, so to regiment, comprehend and control human behavior?

I think there are reasons to doubt this.

One of the things that particularly bugs Law about the RBI stat is that there are cases, as he notes, where the official scorer has discretion over whether to award the RBI. He continues:

"[A]ny stat that involves such human objectivity [I think he meant to write "subjectivity"] is immediately reduced in value as a result. People are prone to so many cognitive biases and are so inconsistent in their judgments..."

But in fact, I would argue, all baseball stats rest, finally, on just this sort of subjectivity. Consider, at the lowest level, baseball is about hits and outs. For example, Law argues that the basic job of a batter is to not make an out -- that is, to get on base.

But are outs determined in a value-free, objective way? Not really. Very frequently, at least, the question of whether an out was made is a judgment call. Instant replay hasn't changed this. It's just removed the required judgment call to a remote location.

And the same is true of hits themselves. When is a hit a hit, and when is it the result of a fielder's error? Nothing determines this other than the decision of the official scorer.

And let's not even get into balls and strikes!

However you look at it, the low-level facts on the ground, the smallest units of meaningful baseball hits, outs, balls, strikes, foul or fair are themselves intrinsically soft, squishy, value-laden matters of interpretation.

Bring the biggest quantificational canon you can find. It won't shoot straight if you set in down on shifting sands.

But maybe this is not a bad thing. Maybe this is what we love about baseball. We are called on to evaluate, to make choices, to make predictions, to lay odds, precisely when there are no algorithms or mathematical rules to do this for us.

I don't advocate a return to tradition. I think Law and his colleagues are right that there is a value in new analytical tools for thinking about baseball. But that's a far cry from accepting his idea that it is possible to use numbers, by themselves, to identify and control value, in baseball, or anywhere else.

Want to know what happened on the field? You'd better take a look.

Alva No is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

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Using Numbers To Comprehend And Control Human Behavior - Delaware First Media

Middle East Eye

EXCLUSIVE: Saudi investor ploughs millions into liberal icon of UK media Middle East Eye According to registers updated on Companies House on Friday, Abuljadayel controls up to 50 percent of voting rights within Independent Digital News and Media, the company that controls the Independent brand. An informed Saudi source described ... and more »

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EXCLUSIVE: Saudi investor ploughs millions into liberal icon of UK media - Middle East Eye