Stick to baseball, 10/21/17.

I wrote two scouting posts for Insiders from my week in the Arizona Fall League, which you can read here and here. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

I reviewed the card/dice game Valeria and its new expansion here on Friday; my next boardgame review for Paste will go up in early November. I also posted about a big boardgame app sale going on right now from Asmodee Digital.

The schedule for PAX Unplugged, a new boardgaming con to be held in Philadelphia in November, is now up. I’ll be signing copies of Smart Baseball there on November 18th and plan to attend the entire event.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Climate change is warming the Alaskan permafrost, affecting residents and potentially releasing an enormous amount of sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere, thus further accelerating global warming.
• Meanwhile, Kiribati, an island nation in the central-south Pacific, may cease to exist due to climate change and rising water levels.
• ProPublica investigates a new white supremacist group that espouses violence but isn’t on authorities’ radar, at least not yet, despite their involvement in multiple violent incidents.
• The drug industry lobbied Congress heavily to emasculate the DEA so they could sell more opioids, and Congressional Republicans (with the help of at least two Democrats) were more than happy to oblige, even as opioid addictions and deaths continue to surge.
• The National Review‘s Kevin Williamson weighs in on the “white minstrel show” that has replaced traditional, values-based conservatism with an opportunistic blend of populist anti-elitism and an abdication of personal responsibility.
• Mother Jones argues that voter suppression tipped the scales in Wisconsin and possibly in the entire election. Voting rights are under attack in most of the south and midwest despite a lack of any evidence of systemic voter fraud.
• The New Yorker looks at what a Mike Pence Presidency might look like, given his ultra-conservative views on pretty much every topic.
• The media reaction in Italy to director/actress Asia Argento revealing that she was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein has revealed how backwards the country is when it comes to women’s rights. Many writers have blamed her, or said she should be grateful to Weinstein, or argued she must have consented because she wasn’t injured. It’s right out of the 1970s.
• Deadspin writer Lindsey Adler asks why this time would be any different from previous revelations of serial sexual abusers’ actions, like Bill Cosby just a year or so ago.
• Victims of Michigan State & US Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar spoke up for 20 years, and no one did anything about it. Even now, he’s going to jail on child pornography charges, not on the dozens of sexual assaults he committed against mostly children.
• Chef Jose Andres has been working tirelessly in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria devastated the island, serving nearly 1.5 million meals to hungry residents.
• Meanwhile, the federal government is sending beef jerky and cheese-flavored crackers to Puerto Rico and calling them meals.
• Budding theocrat Roy Moore, removed from the bench for refusing to accept the separation of church and state (on gay marriage, displaying the Ten Commandments, and so on), now has a large lead in the Alabama Senate race to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions.
• The Columbia Journalism Review argues that media outlets’ restrictions on reporters’ social media activity will backfire, failing to convince readers that the reporters are unbiased while also reducing the value of social media itself.
• Irony alert: Anti-fascist (or just plain old anarchist) protesters disrupted a UCLA event focused on civil discourse and free speech co-sponsored by the Holocaust Museum. Perhaps irony isn’t the right word; ignorance may fit better.
• A mother shares her grief after her 5-year-old died from the flu and is channeling it to urge people to get the flu shot.
• An epidemiologist explains why a recent British article arguing against the flu shot was dead wrong.
• A Georgia lawmaker & former anesthesiologist suggested quarantining people with HIV, further underlining how utterly science-ignorant many of our elected and appointed officials are. It’s yet another reason to support 314 Action, a group dedicated to encouraging more scientists to run for office.
• The first oral treatment for sleeping sickness is nearing approval in Europe, potentially replacing an expensive, difficult intravenous treatment. Sleeping sickness is spread by tsetse flies, and is found in sub-Saharan Africa, with over 2000 new cases a year and the last major epidemic lasting nearly two decades. It’s fatal without medication.
• I didn’t realize InfoWars, the fake news empire led by hoaxer Alex Jones, profited by selling supplements to gullible viewers. It turns out two of their supplements contain dangerously high levels of lead, which can cause brain damage.
• Nestle pays $200/year to bottle clean water in Michigan, just 120 miles away from Flint, where residents can’t drink their tap water due to lead contamination and pay over $200/month to the water utility.
• Mexico is trying to cope with the invasive species they call “the devil fish” by cultivating a taste for this variety of catfish, which has squeezed native species out of its waterways.
• Italian scientists are working to understand the supervolcano located just west of Naples.
• A Los Angeles restaurant was caught selling reheated Popeye’s chicken as its own.
• St. Helena, one of the world’s most isolated islands and a place best known as the place of Napoleon’s exile and death, now has its first commercial airline flights. Dubbed “the world’s most useless airport” by critics, the island’s small airstrip cost the UK government over $300 million to build.
• This story has been well-covered, and it’s still ongoing, but I can’t get over the President of the United States insulting a dead soldier in a call to his mother. “He knew what he was signing up for?” Even if true, which I doubt, what a heartless thing to say to a grieving parent.
• Boardgame news: There’s a new expansion for the Uwe Rosenberg game Fields of Arle, called Tea & Trade.
• The upcoming co-op game Sleepy Hollow hit Kickstarter this past week and is already on the verge of hitting its funding goal.
• Asmodee sent a copy of its upcoming game When I Dream, due out here on 11/23, up into the stratosphere on a helium balloon.
• Europeans find our gun culture utterly baffling, as they should. A Dutch comedy program aired a segment describing the condition known as Nonsensical Rifle Addiction. It appears to have no cure.
• This Atlantic story about a catfishing case that led to a happy ending seems too cute to be true, but let’s just go with it because we could all use some decent news.