guns

→ February 24, 2024
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/24.

My entire prospect rankings for 2024 are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, including:

I held a Klawchat earlier this week to take questions on the lists and more.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Apiary, the latest game from publisher Stonemaier Games (Wingspan, Scythe, Tapestry); The Search for Lost Species, a deduction game and sequel to my #1 game of 2020, The Search for Planet X; and The White Castle, my #1 game of 2023, designed by the folks behind The Red Cathedral.

I also sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter last week, about how we had to put our cat, Hexie, down when a blood clot traveled to his descending aorta and paralyzed his hind quarters. It’s been tough.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Religious zealot and billionaire Tim Dunn is behind the Texas GOP’s hard shift to the right as he tries to remake the state into a Christian theocracy. Imagine if a Muslim billionaire used his money in a similar way. It’s certainly not about following the teachings of Jesus – as does this Catholic charity in El Paso, which is now facing closure at the hands of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
I’ll also just mention here that religious ‘nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S. The term refers to anyone who does not identify themselves as affiliated with a church or religion, including atheists, agnostics, ‘spiritual but not religious’ people, deists, and others.
The New York Times had an excellent story on the athletes recruited to The New School in Florida, as the state pours money into the once-liberal institution to try to turn it into a southern version of Hillsdale College. The kids are going to be all right, despite the adults’ best efforts.
Gary, Indiana, has an ongoing lawsuit against gun manufacturers over their tacit allowance of illegal gun sales. The Indiana Republican Party is trying to pass a bill that would invalidate the suit and protect gun manufacturers from liability.
A former minister in the Christian cult The Truth admitted to molesting a young boy through his role in the ‘church,’ part of a decades-long pattern of abuse and cover-ups in the home-based movement, also known as Two by Twos.
A doctor who went to Gaza to help victims of Israel’s ongoing assault wrote in the LA Times that what he saw “wasn’t war – it was annihilation.”
In the face of growing hate towards Palestinians, some chefs and restaurant owners who come from or trace their ancestry to Palestine are choosing to emphasize their identity
The 76ers’ proposed downtown arena is likely to cost the city millions in lost tax revenue while also risking Philly’s vibrant Chinatown neighborhood. Let the owners pay for it themselves.
There’s a huge measles outbreak in Florida thanks to parents rejecting universal medical advice and skipping the MMR vaccine. Florida’s Surgeon General is telling parents they can still send their unvaccinated kids to school. Measles is the most contagious virus that infects humans, and it can kill children and adults, either during the infection itself or up to a decade later due to an incurable neurological condition called SSPE. This is abject insanity. The MMR vaccine is safe, effective, and led to the (temporary) eradication of measles from the Americas, until Andrew Wakefield and the fucking idiots who follow him brought it back.
KFF Health News looks at how these fringe anti-science views became so dominant in American politics, and what it might mean this November.
Meanwhile, vaccine denialists are everywhere, downplaying the severity of measles. I see it every day on the disinformation hellhole of Twitter. Measles kills, maims, deafens, and more. It can lead to weeks of hospitalizations. I would love to see health insurers insist on vaccinations for coverage, because why should my premiums go up just because someone else was too dumb or misinformed to make the right choice?
West Virginia Republicans saw this outbreak and decided to exempt private schools from the state’s strict vaccination requirements, because I guess having the nation’s highest death rate from opioids wasn’t good enough!
Timor-Leste (formerly known as East Timor) is battling simultaneous outbreaks of three mosquito-borne diseases: Zike, dengue, and chikungunya. We need more releases of genetically modified mosquitoes and mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria to reduce their numbers before these diseases spread further.
Tim Burke, formerly of Deadspin, was indicted in Florida for allegedly hacking Fox News video streams of Kanye West and Tucker Carlson … that Burke says were unprotected by passwords or other encryption. This is a freedom of the press issue. You could contact your Representative or Senator, especially if any serve on their respective Judiciary Committees, as I’ve done. An attack on any journalist is an attack on all of us.
A Texas attorney poisoned his pregnant then-wife with abortion pills, which didn’t cause the pregnancy to terminate but caused enough damage to the fetus that their daughter has developmental delays. He was sentenced to merely 180 days in jail, because abortion bans are not about saving babies (or fetuses), but about subjugating and controlling women.
Abortion rights are a consistent, winning issue for Democrats, writes Ilyse Hogue in the New Republic, and the party needs to lean into that more.
We got an answer, belatedly, on the Hugo Awards’ exclusion of certain works, notably those by Chinese or Chinese-American authors, and it was craven submission to Chinese government involvement. Dave McCarty, a sci-fi fan who was head of the Hugo Committee for 2023, and others resigned and/or were censured. One of the winners, Adrian Tchaikovsky, has already said he will no longer cite or list the award among his honors.
This satirical column from The Crimson mocks national reporters’ obsession with campus life at Harvard.
Posts from the transphobic ‘activist’ LibsOfTikTok led to at least 21 bomb threats against schools, libraries, small businesses, and more. Twitter has done nothing to shut Chaya Raichik down, despite the real-world consequences to her actions.
Pamela Paul wrote an anti-trans editorial in The New York Times. It was riddled with inaccuracies.
The co-founder of the anti-LGBTQ, book-banning advocacy group Moms for Liberty engaged in threesomes with her husband and another woman. Bridget Ziegler is on the school board in Sarasota County, Florida, and her husband Christian (heh) was the former head of the Florida Republican Party. MfL’s influence appears to be waning as more people catch on to their radical agenda.
Seattle cops raided several LGBTQ+ bars in the city, taking photos of patrons, citing regulations banning “lewd conduct.” Owners and patrons fought back, and the state’s liquor board, which oversees such businesses, agreed to knock it off and end this collaboration with the police.
New York’s Nassau County issued an order banning teams with trans athletes from using public fields or arenas, yet another pointless, cruel rule pandering to bigots, a solution in search of a problem.
Republicans smeared Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) over comments she made – but they used a bogus translation to do so.
An old indie blog called The Hairpin that closed in 2018 has come back to life as a zombie clickbait farm.
A mother of four was shot and killed while driving to work in Philadelphia in November, and her family says the police aren’t doing enough to try to solve the case.
There’s a Kickstarter open for Conservas, a new solo bag-building game from designer Scott Almes (Tiny Epic Galaxes, Beer & Bread).

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board game news, florida, guns, harvard, hugo awards, indiana, lgbt rights, links, longreads, new york, philadelphia, religion, seattle, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, west virginia

→ December 9, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/9/23.

Five new pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, breaking down the Jarred Kelenic trade, the Alex Verdugo trade, the Juan Soto trade, the Eduardo Rodríguez/Jeimer Candelario/Craig Kimbrel signings, and the Tyler O’Neill trade.

At Paste, I recapped everything I played at this year’s PAX Unplugged board game convention here in Philly. My time there was a little shorter than normal for various reasons, but I still sneaked in a whole bunch of great new games. I also got Apiary to the table here last night.

My free email newsletter has moved over to Substack. If you got an issue from me on Monday, then you’re all set. Mailchimp is sunsetting their free Tinyletter product, so I had to move it to a different site.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Joel Anderson, who overlapped with me at ESPN for a few years, writes in Slate about ESPN’s abortive attempts to “stick to sports” and the company’s uncertain future.
Mississippi Today exposes a “goon squad” of violent, law-breaking police deputies in Rankin County, home of the state’s capital and largest city, Jackson. The report describes beatings of suspects in petty drug crimes – or no crimes at all – and long prison sentences based on coerced confessions.
A professor at Nevada-Reno began a sexual relationship with one of his students. She’s now accusing him of rape and extortion; he says the relationship was consensual and that she has threatened him and his wife since he ended it. The Chronicle of Higher Education tries to tell the whole story, but isn’t the fact that he had a relationship with a student he oversaw enough to cost him his job? There is no consent with such an imbalance of power.
King Charles is taking the assets of dead Britons and using the money to upgrade properties he owns in his commercial portfolio.
I spent some time this week at the Barista Parlor in East Nashville, but I won’t be back after a reader pointed out that the owners have engaged in union-busting, including closing a shop where workers tried to unionize.
Trump’s lawyers have brought an internet conspiracy theory into one of their filings, accusing a Wisconsin reporter of being a plant at the January 6^th insurrection.
The United States has broken its record for the most mass shootings in a single calendar year, and we still have over three weeks to go.
In defense of the block button.
Young Fathers gave an incredible performance on KEXP, playing four songs from their latest album, Heavy Heavy.
A woman who threw a bowl of hot food in the face of a worker at a Chipotle will serve 30 days in prison and have to work 60 days in fast food. It’s a showy sentence, but I think it’s better than more prison time, and maybe it will build some empathy in the perpetrator.
The executive committee of the Texas Republican Party rejected a proposal to ban associations with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: great britain, guns, links, longreads, metoo, mississippi, Music, nevada, stick to baseball, texas, unions

→ November 18, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/18/23.

I offered my opinions of the Aaron Bummer and Cal Quantrill trades for subscribers to the Athletic. That Jake Bauers trade really didn’t move the needle, but I’ll probably include a thought or two on the Vidal Bruján trade when we get another one so I can include it in a longer column.

On my podcast this week, I spoke with film critic Matt Singer about his new book Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I appeared on Seattle’s 710 AM to discuss the Mariners’ possible offseason moves and the challenge of competing in the AL West in 2024.

My free email newsletter has returned, as I sent out a fresh edition last night, my second one this month.

And now, the links…

ProPublica looks at how two women died on the property of an Alaska Mayor, but no one’s ever been arrested or charged – even though they were both involved with the now ex-mayor’s sons, who both had histories of domestic violence.
Colorado banned forced labor in its prisons in 2018, but prisoners in the state are still being punished for refusing work assignments, according to an investigation from Bolts magazine.
The BBC has a great piece on the (im)possibility of time travel on the eve of the new season of Doctor Who.
Trump laid out some very autocratic aims if he’s elected in 2024. The New York Times looked at his plans for mass deportations and concentration camps for undocumented migrants. The Washington Post also looked at the same, as Greg Sargent refers to the “brutal reality” of the next election. And Axios has some details on Trump’s plan to install loyalists throughout the federal government, called Project 2025 and developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
Elon Musk endorsed what amounts to a “Great Replacement Theory” tweet, leading IBM, Apple, and others to pause advertising on X.com. Full disclosure: As of this morning, my employer is still advertising on the site.
Delaware Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long, one of two declared Democratic candidates for our gubernatorial race, has been caught up in a possible scandal around over $200,000 in campaign payments to her husband. She has claimed that it’s a repayment of a personal loan to the campaign.
Police in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, a city right next to Albuquerque, responded to a home there where a woman said her caretaker was threatening to kill her. The police complimented the caretaker on his guns, one of which he used a few hours later to kill the woman in his care. It appears the police chief is saying his officers did nothing wrong.
Ohio Republicans suffered two huge losses on Election Day ballot questions, so now they’re pledging to defy the will of the people by stripping the judiciary of its powers, prompting Toledo entrepreneur Pete Kadens to write that Ohio is the most antidemocratic state in the country.
I posted a link a few weeks ago to the New York/ProPublica investigation into serial abuser Dr. Robert Hadden of Columbia University; the school has now set up a $100 million compensation fund and begun contacting his former patients, a turnaround from the school’s past attempts to act like they knew nothing of his crimes and bore no responsibility to his patients. Hadden was convicted of multiple sexual assaults in January and is serving a 20-year sentence.
No matter what you read on the internet, incidents of sudden cardiac death in college athletes have declined over the last twenty years.
A school in Iowa had to pay for increased security after a single teacher there posted a joke that Chaya Raichik, who posts as “LibsOfTikTok,” then shared to her 2.6 million followers with a tag identifying the school district.
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, home to Middle Tennessee State University, passed an ordinance banning any public displays of homosexual behavior. The ACLU is already challenging it. MTSU hosts the state’s oldest LGBTQ+ student organization, MT Lambda, but I guess those kids just can’t step off campus.
The Atlantic looks at the plight of firstborn daughters, who are expected to be caregivers and to be high achievers in many cultures.
Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Boyer resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine.
You should read this wonderful obituary of New Orleans resident Virginia Jane Smith, who died this month at age 98 and survived Hurricane Katrina by living for a week off boiled eggs, water, and whiskey. As the headline says, may her memory be a blessing.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alaska, colorado, delaware, guns, links, longreads, metoo, new mexico, ohio, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, vaccines

→ May 27, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 5/27/23.

For subscribers to The Athletic, I posted my first mock draft of 2023, and answered a slew of questions from readers.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game Motor City, from the brains behind Fleet: the Dice Game and Three Sisters.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Scott McCaughey, founding member of the Young Fresh Fellows, the Minus Five, and the Baseball Project, the last of which are about to release a new album, Grand Salami Time! and tour in support of it.You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I owe everyone a fresh newsletter, which I’ve already started writing so I suppose I can at least share the link to sign up.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: New York profiles Nebraska legislator Michaela Cavanaugh, part of the filibuster against that state’s transphobic bill, who said on the floor “I want the bloody hands recorded” because the bill, now a law, will lead to the deaths of trans kids.

The New Yorker examines whether Planned Parenthood is doing enough to fight for abortion rights and the dwindling number of providers who offer this essential health care.

ProPublica looks at a man who believed his local school board was pushing “transgender bullshit,” got arrested for trespassing at a meeting, and was only further encouraged when the charges were dropped and he faced no consequences. Much of the rhetoric attributed to him in this article sounds like the same nonsense that so-called “sovereign citizens” have used to avoid paying taxes.

ProPublica also exposed the use of “family reunification camps,” which often force children to attend with parents who may have been neglectful or even abusive. After the article ran, Colorado became the first state to limit courts’ ability to use them.

Will Leitch wrote an op ed for the New York Times about how Trump running for President again means that families will be back to fighting again.

Who’s footing the bills for Ron DeSantis’s Presidential campaign? The Michigan nonprofit funding him won’t say where the money is coming from.

And who’s footing the bills for Kyrsten Sinema? Turns out the dark-money group behind her is funded a long of extreme right-wingers, like Harlan Crow, James Rupert Murdoch, and Nelson Peltz.

An Illinois state investigation found the Catholic Church lied about how many children its clergy abused, putting the actual number at nearly two thousand since 1950. These are actual groomers, people who have harmed kids and a tax-exempt organization that allowed it to continue.

If you live in Florida and want to restore reproductive rights, here’s a petition you can print out and sign to try to get abortion on the ballot there.

Meanwhile, Florida is going to arrest people in bathrooms regardless of their legal gender status. How anyone can miss the parallels to Germany under the Nazis is beyond me.

Ohio’s Senate passed a bill that will gut diversity initiatives in higher education in the state while curtailing academic freedom

The Washington Post examined book-banning requests across the country and found that the majority came from just eleven ~~cranks~~ people.

Lauren Boebert, she of good Christian family values and whatnot, is getting a divorce. It says a lot about why Republican men are pushing as hard as ever on their misogynistic policy goals.

Exavier Pope wrote about how Ja Morant was wrong, but the reaction to him says more about America’s fear of Black gun owners.

With a little sodium citrate, you can make any cheese into a silky-smooth cheese sauce, even cheeses that don’t ordinarily melt.

I actually backed Filler, a new storage system for small-box board games, on Kickstarter. When I first got the pitch, I thought it was silly, but then I realized how many of these games I own and how sloppy they tend to look on the shelves.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, board games, florida, food science, guns, illinois, links, longreads, nebraska, ohio, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights

→ January 22, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/21/23.

No new content for subscribers to the Athletic as I’ve continued writing capsules for the top 100 prospects ranking, which will run on January 30^th. Please stand by.

My podcast did return this week, with guest Seth Reiss, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Menu. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m planning to send out another issue of my free email newsletter on Sunday, now that I’m back on track with the prospect stuff. I was fairly stressed about it as recently a few days ago, but I’ve caught up enough that I can finish everything with a reasonable daily output of words.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A 17-year-old woman in Texas wanted an abortion. A judge decided she wasn’t “mature” enough to make that choice. ProPublica looks at the ramifications of that decision.

The BBC looks at the revolutionary TV show Homicide: Life on the Street on the 30^th anniversary of its debut. I can remember seeing it for the first time and being riveted. I’d never seen a TV show like that before.

The Ringer looks back at the Simpsons episode “Marge vs. the Monorail” on the 30^th anniversary of its first airing.

An epidemiologist and an emergency medicine physician debunk the whole “died suddenly” myth around COVID-19 vaccines. No, people are not dying suddenly of cardiac events from vaccines; we did see a jump in such cardiac deaths, but it came in 2020 and early 2021, due to COVID-19 infections.

New York’s Intelligencer explains how the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary might take down Project Veritas – but that the case is creating some surprising bedfellows for the right-wing hoaxers.

Also from Intelligencer, a longread on what it’s like right now at Twitter.

The San Francisco Chronicle has the heartbreaking story of a mother’s attempts to help her daughter, a 35-year-old opioid addict living on the San Francisco streets, touching on the city’s lack of services for addicts and for homeless people. There’s a sad baseball connection: The daughter’s boyfriend, Abdul Cole, was a Marlins minor leaguer for three years, but died last April.

A new research paper looks at decision fatigue in the context of baseball umpires.

The COVID misinformation-spreading Brownstone Institute is mostly funded by a small number of large, anonymous donations, and is led by a neo-Confederate advocate who has previously written for white nationalist sites.

LitHub has an excerpt from Dr. Henry Marsh’s new book, And Finally: Matters of Life and Death, as the 70-year-old neurosurgeon faces his own likely terminal cancer diagnosis.

Quanta looks at a 17-year-old who helped prove part of a theorem on the pseudoprimes known as Carmichael numbers, which are related to Fermat’s Little Theorem (not the more famous Last Theorem).

The School Board of Madison County, Virginia, voted to ban 21 books from its libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale and four books by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, because Christian groups complained.

Meanwhile, two Christian activists in Crawford County, Arkansas, are trying to remove the library director and defund the system over the display of LGBTQ+ books, calling it an “alternative lifestyle.” Sexual orientation is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Gender identity is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Religion is a lifestyle, and a choice.

How does this shit happen? Because right-wing zealots have been pushing to take over school and library boards. The Christian nationalist group FlashPoint is even holding an event to train people to run for these positions.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) says that schools there cannot teach AP African-American History because of the state’s anti-anti-racism law.

And that same law has professors at universities across the state scrambling to avoid any possibility that their courses would be found to violate it. So a law that is supposed to prohibit “indoctrination” is increasing the likelihood students will receive indoctrination, but from the other side.

Iowa Republicans are trying to defund public schools by allowing parents to use vouchers for private schools, including religious schools, which would seem to violate the principle of separation of church and state. You can send your kids to a parochial school, but only without my tax dollars.

The City of Pittsburgh passed an ordinance prohibiting police from using secondary infractions as a reason to make traffic stops. The Chief of Police has told officers to ignore it.

Idaho Republicans are trying to “fix” the state’s anti-abortion law to avoid prosecuting women who have ectopic pregnancies, but within the article, you can see quotes from a legislator who wants to remove exemptions for cases of rape or incest and said that a woman who became pregnant after she was raped by a family member would view it “as the opportunity to have a child.” He also invoked Martin Luther King, Jr., of course.

Texas’s Supreme Court declined to block the state’s attempted takeover of the publicly elected school board in Houston.

Gregg Doyel says Tony Dungy should stick to sports and stop spreading anti-LGBTQ+ nonsense.

A couple of Eagles players recorded a Christmas album for charity, hoping to raise about $30,000. It raised $250,000 and will help fund two toy drives and a summer camp for Philly kids with serious behavioral problems. (We have a copy.)

Utah police investigated and then ignored complaints about child abuse from the daughter of the Mormon man who killed his wife, kids, and himself earlier this month. His 14-year-old daughter described serious physical abuse at her father’s hands less than three years ago, but no charges were filed.

Scottsdale has cut off a nearby town, Rio Verde Foothills, from its city water supply, leaving the residents to use rain water to flush their toilets. The subtext here is that the whole state is going to run out of water sooner rather than later.
A Republican candidate for the House in New Mexico was arrested for shooting at the homes of multiple Democratic legislators.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, arkansas, baseball, drugs, florida, guns, iowa, links, math, new mexico, pittsburgh, san francisco, social media, stick to baseball, texas, tv, utah, vaccines

→ January 14, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 1/14/23.

My latest piece for subscribers to the Athletic went up last Saturday, a breakdown of the Phillies’ trade for Gregory Soto, a deal I quite like for Detroit. My podcast will return this upcoming week, and the top 100 prospects ranking is scheduled to run on January 30^th.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the roll-and-write game Riverside, which just missed my top ten games of 2022 list (it was the final cut).

I’ve sent out two editions of my free email newsletter in two weeks (!), so you should definitely sign up now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Financial Times has a fascinating story on four women who work as spies in Britain’s SIS, looking at their actual jobs and lives (as much as possible) and the agency’s history of discrimination, often to its own detriment.

Patrick Burleigh wrote about growing up with testotoxicosis, an extremely rare condition that causes boys to begin puberty as young as age two.

The Denver Post tells how a consultant to the Denver Art Museum used her position and imprimatur to help an art smuggler move looted items from holy sites in southeast Asia. The consultant, Emma Bunker, died last year.

The New York Times, which was also guilty of the sins described in this article, looks at how biased polls that implied there would be a ‘red wave’ this November screwed up the narrative and led Democrats to commit resources to many of the wrong races.

The Philly Inquirer looks at the successes and struggles of Mastbaum High School, a vocational/technical school in Kensington, a neighborhood often called ground zero of the city’s opioid epidemic. One unavoidable conclusion: the school is wildly underfunded given its role in the community.

You may have seen a claim about more athletes dying from cardiac arrest since the COVID-19 vaccines were introduced than died from the same in the preceding twenty or so years. It’s bullshit, and comes from a source-less site called goodsciencing that is probably backed by the CEO of conservative site NewsBlaze.

Dr. Céline Gounder, Grant Wahl’s widow, wrote about how anti-vaxxers also pounced on her husband’s death to spread misinformation and outright lies. Fucking ghouls.

A romance novelist faked her own death, and has now returned like nothing ever happened.

The cousin of one of the founders of Black Lives Matter flagged down a police car after an accident. One of the officers Tased the man so extensively that he died of cardiac arrest. Keenan Anderson was unarmed. The LAPD is already blaming the victim, saying he had cocaine in his system, which, last I checked, is not a capital crime.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is weaponizing Florida’s public schools, using political appointees to try to stifle any future dissent coming from its students. Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin explains just how bad a DeSantis presidency would be.

Damar Hamlin’s tragedy has been fodder for anti-vaxxer lies. The BBC also looked at how the conspiracy theorists pounced. So did WBUR, while Forbes looked at the backlash to the anti-vaxxers, including a tweet from yours truly.

A fake tweet claiming a Florida doctor had made absurd pro-vaccine statements was amplified by a host of alt-right accounts, and Twitter refused to take it down, leading to a wave of harassment against her. VICE also covered the story, focusing on Joe Rogan amplifying the tweet.

Meanwhile, public confidence in the MMR vaccine, which fights measles, mumps, and rubella, is waning after two years of attacks from denialists and grifters against COVID-19 vaccines.

The BBC invited a cardiologist turned anti-vax grifter (he charges $10K-$20K per speaking appearance now) on air to discuss a cholesterol medication, but he hijacked the interview to make false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Germany has warned Twitter that it’s running afoul of EU laws against misinformation.

An adjunct professor at Hamline University in Minnesota followed multiple steps before showing a painting of Muhammad in an art class, and was still fired after a Muslim student complained.

Yet another fake AirBnB listing scam, this time in Philly, with renters showing up to find that the house was listed without the owners’ knowledge.

Writer Hilary de Vries described her struggle getting effective treatment for her sister, who has schizoaffective disorder and has trouble holding on to housing.

New York City is paying $135,000 to a homeless man its cops beat and dragged off the subway. The cops lied about him hitting them first, but body-camera footage proved them wrong.

One recent poll found that two-thirds of Britons now want a referendum to rejoin the EU. So it was Leave, Remain, or Regret?

The Times continues to uncover lies and inconsistencies in Rep. George Santos’ background, including possible campaign finance violations.

CNBC joins the parade of investigations into Santos, this time showing his campaign may have committed fraud when a staffer allegedly posed as a member of Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s team on fundraising calls.

Right-wingers have been organizing for several years to take over school boards so they could push their theological, homophobic, transphobic, and even white supremacist agendas into public schools. The Philly Inquirer has a story about some progressives who are belatedly fighting back.

For example, Central Bucks schools in Bucks County, which I think is where Deliverance was filmed, have banned teachers from displaying Pride flags or other inclusive materials in classrooms, thanks to a school board dominated by right-wingers.

Smithtown, New York, the retrograde part of Long Island where I was born, decided to remove all Pride displays from its libraries back in June. This isn’t shocking if you’ve been there, as it’s as provincial a suburb as you’ll find. People there don’t get off the Island enough to realize there’s a whole big world out there.

Texas’ Department of Agriculture issued a report stating that climate change threatens the state’s food supply. Of course, Gov. Greg Abbott, when he’s not busy spending Texas citizens’ money on busing migrants to northern cities, has blocked local attempts to fight climate change.

In other performative political stunts, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) banned state officials from using the gender-inclusive term “Latinx.” She also signed an order banned state schools from teaching critical race theory, which I hope some Arkansas journalist asks her to define.

Alabama, fighting for the title of America’s biggest backwater, is now claiming (via its Attorney General) that women there who use abortion pills obtained from out of state will be prosecuted, which I don’t think is constitutional but I’m not a lawyer.

A deputy campaign manager for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) sent an email to teachers asking them to encourage students to volunteer for her re-election campaign in exchange for class credit.

A baseball player for Northwestern has filed a defamation suit against multiple women who accused him of sexual assault or other inappropriate behavior, even one who did not make those accusations public, according to this Deadspin story.

Scientists have observed quantum interference between two different kinds of particles – similar to entanglement, Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” which occurs between two related particles – for the first time.

Why is cutting the U.S. defense budget such a forbidden concept?

Writing for The Nation, Elie Mystal explains why passing gun control laws is futile with an archconservative judiciary in place.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, academia, alabama, florida, guns, links, longreads, new york, pennsylvania, philadelphia, physics, police, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, vaccines

→ December 17, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/17/22.

Five new posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic:

I’ll try to do a Klawchat this upcoming week as my schedule permits; I’m trying to fill my days with calls for the prospect rankings package that will run in late January or early February.

My top ten games of 2022 article is already in my editor’s hands at Paste, so that should be up any day now. I’ll update here when it runs.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Boston Globe writer Alex Speier, talking about the Red Sox’ confusing offseason so far and apparent desire to act like a small- or medium-payroll team. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve got a new email newsletter about half-written, so I’m really hoping I can finish that off tonight or tomorrow. You can sign up here, for free. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore.

Finally, I caved and set up an account on Mastodon, @keithlaw@mastodon.au. Perhaps that’ll prove a better place for actual discussions with readers as the bird site becomes overrun by trolls – even my post saying I was on Mastodon attracted three randos who seemed only there to mock anyone who said they were leaving Twitter (which I’m not).

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times ran a “Lives They Lived” piece on twelve children murdered with guns in 2022, as gun violence has surpassed auto accidents as the leading cause of death for children in the United States. I think I was most affected by the one on a 17-year-old boy whose brother was also shot and killed several years previously. No way to prevent this, says only nation where this happens regularly.
ProPublica opens the window on CIA-led night raids on Afghan civilians, for which the U.S. has never taken responsibility. Mission Accomplished, though, right?
Adam Serwer, writing for the Atlantic, writes about conservatives’ invention of the “right to post,” although it doesn’t seem to apply to everyone, just them, as Twitter suspended a bunch of journalists who report on Elon Musk’s doings. NBC promptly beshit themselves by failing to back up Ben Collins, even taking him off the air for a few days for ~~defending evolution~~ failing to insufficiently worship Musk.
Also in the Atlantic, the solution to our growing problem of homelessness is to create more housing. That’s it.
Leading Republican figures had no problem gathering with ardent white nationalists talking about “total war” at the New York Young Republican Club’s recent gala.
This Twitter thread on the extreme right-wing concept euphemistically called “Common Good Constitutionalism,” which believes hardcore Christianity should be the guiding principle for our country, should terrify the rational among us regardless of our political leanings.
A professor at Chico State had an affair with a student and threatened to kill two co-workers, but the university only suspended him for a third of a semester while leaving any mention of the incident out of his personnel file. He’s since been suspended again through the end of this academic year after a new outcry over the school’s mishandling of the matter in 2020.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment for seven years for alleged securities law violations, sought information on Texas residents who changed the genders on their driver’s licenses amidst the state’s push to punish trans people for existing. If he can do this, I’m not sure what prevents any state official from demanding a list of residents who are Black, Jewish, etc.
Also in Texas, Carroll ISD no longer protects students against discrimination based on their gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Texas’s lurch towards theocracy continues virtually unimpeded.
Florida passed a law in June that was supposed to address the state’s shortage of about 5000 teachers by putting military veterans, even those with zero educational experience, in the classroom. The state has hired seven.
One member of Twitter’s now-disused Trust & Safety Council explained to Slate why she quit the board after Elon Musk bought the company.
Harassment and threats of violence, encouraged by Musk himself, forced former Twitter head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth to flee his home last weekend.
The Kickstarter for a new printing of the 2017 game Sol: Last Days of a Star is already funded at over $140K pledged with two weeks to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: academia, board game news, california, florida, guns, links, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights

→ November 5, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 11/5/22.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 free agents in this year’s class, and held a Q&A about it that afternoon. Based on my Twitter replies, a lot of people looked at the raw rankings without reading any of the content. Good times!

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Caroline Criado Perez, author of the book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Menand host of the podcast Visible Women. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Last week’s roundup went up late because of all the sportsball going on over the weekend, so I’m relinking it here for folks who missed it.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Writing for the New Yorker, Jessica Winter looks at the rise in early puberty for American girls and what it might mean for them in the short- and long-term. She also explores the complex reasons why this trend increased during the pandemic.
A ProPublica/Texas Tribune joint investigation shed more light on the botched police response in Uvalde.
The Intercept ran a widely shared story about the Department of Homeland Security collaborating with tech companies to suppress (dis)information, but TechDirt writer Mike Masnick says the story is “absolute garbage.”
Have you seen the “stop the insanity” or “anti-white bigotry” ads running during the MLB playoffs? Both are funded by dark-money groups founded and run by former Trump officials, including Stephen Miller. They’re bullshit, notably the first one’s claims about crime being out of control – crime is way down from the 1990s.
John Leguizamo wrote an open letter to Hollywood about the continued lack of opportunities for Latinx actors on screen, in spite of growing evidence that movies and shows built around such actors and characters do well financially. The same argument applies to Black or Asian actors.
Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, one of the worst and most vocal anti-vaxxers online for at least a decade, is now, finally under investigation by the Ohio medical board for her ridiculous testimony before that state’s legislature where she claimed COVID-19 vaccines made people magnetic, among other falsehoods.
So much content on Elon Musk’s flailing takeover of Twitter, from how he’s backing down on promises and kowtowing to regulators to a massive drop in advertisers to a badly botched mass layoff to a class-action lawsuit because the layoff violated California law. And that’s without getting into this silly Twitter Blue program, that misunderstands the part where verifying users benefits Twitter, not the other way around.
Musk also shot himself in the foot by retweeting a false right-wing conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, which Musk later deleted, but not before amplifying it to his huge follower base.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who campaigned on the bogus pretense that critical race theory was being taught in the state’s elementary schools, set up a tip line for parents to rat out schools that were teaching stuff they didn’t like. Parents instead used it to report actual violations of their rights, such as the denial of special education requests, including services and evaluations.
Countries in the Middle East are happily selling oil to the world while shifting to cleaner energy sources themselves. They know you don’t get high on your own supply.
Dr. Oz had a paper rejected in 2003 over questions about the strength of the data he used to reach his conclusions, earning a two-year ban from publishing in that same journal – an unusually harsh punishment.
The Slay the Spire board game Kickstarter has raised over $2 million already.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, guns, links, longreads, ohio, oil, pennsylvania, privacy, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines, virginia

→ October 29, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/29/22.

One new post for subscribers to the Athletic this week – a fairly quickly-written post on what the Yankees could do this winter to fix their club, notably their offense. I’m about ¾ of the way through the top 50 free agents rankings, which will run the day after the World Series ends.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the trick-taking game Cat in the Box, which takes the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment as its inspiration. Cards have numbers but no suits until they’re played – as in, when they’re observed. Apparently my review was so positive the game has sold out everywhere!

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Joe Posnanski, who helped me preview the World Series, talk a little about the highs and lows of the playoffs so far, and talk a little about free agency. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can sign up for my free email newsletter and at some point I’ll send another one out. Also, you can buy either of my books, Smart Baseball or The Inside Game, via bookshop.org at those links, or at your friendly local independent bookstore. I hear they make great holiday gifts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ProPublica has the best story yet on how the couplpe that owns the shipping materials behemoth U-Line uses their profits to fund all kinds of extreme right-wing causes, from election denial to anti-LGBTQ+ laws to anti-abortion laws and more. They oppose anything that might improve workers’ rights or raise taxes on the ultra-rich, too. If you get a box made by U-Line, contact the shipper and ask them to use someone else. I’ve done this many times and only once have I gotten a negative reply – and I won’t do business with that company again.

This Atlantic story about a realtor in Michigan who was convinced he’d cracked the state lottery’s algorithm is a great illustration of our innate tendencies to see patterns in randomness – and how we can convince ourselves of almost anything.

Music journalist and author Caryn Rose ranked all 234 U2 songs for Rolling Stone. I found myself agreeing with most of the top of the list, although as someone who first encountered the band through MTV’s heavy rotation of “New Year’s Day,” I think that one is too low.

MLB.com writer Matthew Monaghan wrote a lovely piece for Travel + Leisure on revisiting his late wife’s favorite vacation spot, Bermuda. It’s a tough but beautiful read.

Texas no longer requires a permit for handguns, leading to more spontaneous shootings. It sounds like police – the blue we’re supposed to back – don’t seem to like this new lawless reality.

The massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, again, a state that decided that anyone can carry a gun without a permit, has made an activist out of one of the 10-year-old survivors.

Why didn’t St. Louis police take the gun from the kid who killed a teacher and another student in a school there last week, since he failed a background check?

At The Verge, Nilay Patel writes how Elon Musk can’t possibly adhere to his stated “free speech” goals and run what was already a “disaster clown car company” profitably. It’s not hard to agree – Twitter hasn’t been growing, its ad revenues lag behind any competitors, it faces a tangle of regulations and pressure from markets where Musk’s Tesla wants to grow, and the site has never figured out how to deal with harassment and abuse. I’m not leaving, but I’ve already been engaging less on the site, and if a viable alternative emerges I’ll gladly check it out.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories spreading on the farcical social media app Truth Social have led to actual armed idiots “patrolling” around ballot boxes to try to spot voter fraud.

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physics went to three scientists for their work on quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein once derided as “spooky action at a distance.” Author John Horgan writes of the beauty of this work and how it seems to defy common sense for Scientific American.

Physicist Peter Fisher gave a talk at my alma mater about the search for dark matter and the theory that WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are what make up this missing mass.

The Washington Post reports on the network of people helping direct pills to terminate pregnancies to people in states where abortion is now illegal.

Disinformation dealer Dinesh D’Souza’s publisher deleted defamatory details after recalling his new book 2000 Mules, even though he’d promised to name names. What a ding-dong.

As President, Trump had his hotels charge the Secret Service – and thus, all of us who pay taxes – five times the maximum room rate allowed by federal law, and then he lied about it.

I don’t link to the Federalist, a disinformation-spewing site funded by the owners of U-Line, very often, but this piece arguing that conservatives should fight for stronger government and more intervention in all areas of society certainly seems to remove the mask from the extreme right, because that is not conservatism – it’s fascism.

In good Administration news that seems to be flying under the radar, President Biden is moving to cancel a program to develop a new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile, which wouldn’t have been ready until 2035 and which the administration says is redundant with existing weapons. Some anti-nuclear weapon groups say Biden hasn’t gone far enough. The military, meanwhile, wants all the weapons.

As the parent of a teenager, I often feel like part of my job is try to reduce the stresses she faces in school and life, because we hear so much about how much stress our kids are under and I have a natural instinct to want to protect her. Psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour argues instead that we should teach our teenagers to embrace stress so they’re better equipped to handle it throughout their lives.

Longtime Philly Inquirer writer Stephanie Farr wrote a fun piece on Philadelphia sports fandom.

Over 250 writers signed a letter to Penguin Random House protesting the publisher’s $2 million book deal with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, given her pivotal role in removing a fundamental right from tens of millions of Americans.

Board game news: Aegean Sea, the newest game from Glory to Rome co-designer Carl Chudyk, is up on Backerkit with 12 days to go.

Oh My Brain!, a new game from Bruno Cathala and Theo Riviere, is now up for pre-order at $5 off on 25^th Century’s website.

The Queen’s Dilemma, a standalone sequel game to the Spiel-nominated King’s Dilemma, is closing in on $400K raised on Kickstarter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, guns, links, longreads, misinformation, missouri, parenting, philadelphia, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp

→ June 11, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 6/11/22.

I had one post for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, on Kumar Rocker’s 2022 debut for the independent Tri-City Valley Cats. (I tried to go see Reading/Altoona this week, but got rained out after I parked but before I even got into the stadium.) My current writing schedule has one more draft blog post coming after I see Carson Whisenhunt’s official 2022 debut on Sunday night, and then an updated Big Board on Thursday, June 16^th.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was film critic (and Cardinals fan) Tim Grierson, talking about the logistics of film festivals and their similarities to scouting showcases, plus our thoughts on The Godfather trilogy as the first film marks its 50^th anniversary. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I do send out a free email newsletter about twice a month. My two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kathryn Schulz, author of the wonderful memoir Lost & Found, writes about the world of sunken shipping containers and the detritus that washes up on shore from them. I would guess the occasional meeple shows up among the flotsam and jetsam.

Land in the Chicago area promised for public housing, undeveloped for twenty years, is now going to house a practice facility for the MLS’s Chicago Fire.

LA Eater looks at the changing of the guard in southern California’s doughnut shops, as the children of the mostly Cambodian immigrants who founded those stores take over from their parents.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in support of reading challenging books and against removing them from school libraries and curricula.

Steve Kirsch, one of the inventors of the optical mouse and a serial entrepreneur, has become a massive proponent of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and false cures. McGill University’s Jonathan Jarry looks at how Kirsch got from A to B.

The Daily Beast reports on two twins who are college students in Texas and who are “pushing transphobic campaigns” at their respective schools, the University of North Texas and Baylor.

The Tampa Bay Rays’ account tweeted several facts about gun violence in the United States, after which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blocked state funding for a new player development facility in Pasco County.

Writing for DAME, attorney & counsel to the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center Madiba Kennie asks if Supreme Court reform is even possible.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg writes about the complexity and contradictions of the investigation into the release of the Supreme Court draft opinion that will overturn Roe v. Wade. Speaking of the Supreme Court, Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, emailed 29 Arizona lawmakers to urge them to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory in that state.

A 13-year-old Baltimore middle school student died suddenly on a school field trip in Cecil County, Maryland. There’s still no indication why he died or details on what happened, five days later. What a nightmare for his family.

More families are suing Texas over the state’s investigations into parents who provide gender-affirming care to their trans kids. A district court judge ruled on Friday that the state must suspend these investigations.

Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh tweeted this week that gender reassignment surgery should be illegal for everyone, regardless of age.

A Baptist preacher in Texas said to his congregation that all gay people “should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head … That’s what the Bible says.” (The Bible does not say that.)

Sen. Rick Scott’s “plan to save America” denies the existence of trans people. In her newsletter, Parker Molloy explains how his proposed policies, and existing policies in places like Ohio, just make life more difficult for trans and intersex people.

Belgium’s King Philippe spoke about the damage his great-great-uncle, Léopold II, did to what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo through colonization and exploitation of its people and natural resources. For a harrowing but essential read on the topic, I recommend King Léopold’s Ghost, recommended to me a decade ago by one of you, which details the awful period where Africa’s largest country was a personal colony of the Belgian king, and explains why the DRC has been unstable for its entire history since independence.

An 8-year-old boy who was on vacation with his family in South Carolina was shot and killed by a resident who was shooting at passing cars.

An Uvalde pediatrician who treated victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary testified before Congress about the state of the bodies he saw.

The Washington Post has fired writer Felicia Sonmez. I won’t even attempt to summarize this in a sentence or two – the article (from The New York Times) has the details.

A Catholic group is urging followers to “hide the pride” by going to libraries and hiding books with LGBTQ+ content.

The Missouri Library Association is urging the Wentzville, Missouri, school board to stop removing LGBTQ+ books from school libraries.

The Guardian explains “greenwashing,” when companies contributing to climate change run ads, such as on podcasts that tell stories about climate change and the fight against it, implying that those companies are aligned with the show’s aims.

The Kickstarter for Bark Avenue, a quick pickup-and-delivery game from a new publisher in New York, ends in just two days.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, environment, florida, guns, lgbt rights, links, longreads, misinformation, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

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