stick to baseball

→ March 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/11/23.

Nothing new at the Athletic this week, although I should have 2-3 coming up this week as my travels continue. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the game Gartenbau, which combines very simple rules with tight decisions that make it a real challenge to play it well.

On The Keith Law Show this week, I had my annual Oscars preview episode with Chris Crawford. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I was going to send another issue of my free email newsletter this week but got tied up with some other writing (board game stuff, actually), so it’s still on my to-do list.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED has the story of the takedown of a former Iraqi translator who became a major fentanyl dealer in the U.S. and is now serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is trying to strip the press of its First Amendment rights.

The rash of anti-trans bills across the south and Midwest are the work of a network of religious-right groups that operated in secret while pushing their bigoted agenda, according to emails between those groups and South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) obtained by Mother Jones.

ProPublica has more information on billionaire Leonard Leo’s new plan to try to “crush liberal dominance” in American politics and culture. He’s considered the main architect of the strategy that gave conservatives a 6-3 Supreme Court majority and control of much of the federal judiciary.

My wife and I watched the Oscar-nominated animated short My Year of Dicks, which is very funny and sweet, which led us down the rabbit hole of its writer Pamela Ribon, including this hilarious 2011 post from her now-defunct blog about how she might have become a new urban legend.

Walgreens won’t sell abortion pills in states that merely threatened legal action, even though the medication is still legal in those locations.

Failed actor turned conservative talking head Michael Knowles, called for transgender people to be “eradicated” in a speech at the far-right convention CPAC this week.

All of the rhetoric you’re seeing against trans people right now was previously used against gays/lesbians by the same sort of Christianist activists.

A girls basketball team in Hoover, Alabama, the host city for the SEC baseball tournament, was forced to play in a boys’ rec league if they wanted to continue to use city facilities. When they subsequently won the league’s tournament, they were denied the trophy, which was then given to the boys’ team that finished second, because they are a ‘competitive’ team playing in a recreational league.

An anti-vaxxer nurse in Spain is in court, accused of faking vaccinations of children.

After a woman went on a racist tirade in a pizzeria near Philly, TikTok vigilantes tried to identify her, and instead targeted three innocent women instead, leading to widespread harassment.

From January 2022: Ashli Babbitt, who some right-wingers want you to believe was a martyr, had a history of violent behavior prior to her participation in the January 6^th insurrection.

Witnesses at Guantanamo Bay recalled Ron DeSantis laughing while prisoners there were tortured.

Utah legislators have voted to change the law that made it nearly impossible for victims of sexual assault by doctors to sue their attackers.

The Tennessee House passed a bill gutting marriage equality, possibly allowing elected officials to decline to issue a license to a couple for any reason. The state’s Republicans also passed a law banning drag shows, which is nothing more than performative bigotry

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, alabama, first amendment, florida, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, utah, vaccines

→ March 4, 2023
→ By keith

I posted an early draft ranking of just 30 names, enough for a typical round, for subscribers to The Athletic. I’ll expand that list a few times and eventually get to 100 by May or so, but I’d like to at least see all the high school players get started.

No podcast this week as the guest I had lined up had to reschedule. Feel free to sign up for my free email newsletter, as I’ll be sending another one out this week.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Financial Times has a deep dive into how Putin blundered into Ukraine and has continued isolating himself from would-be advisers who might have helped him out of this mess. The writer posits that Putin may try to hold on until January of 2025, hoping we elect a Republican as President and thus pull our military support of Ukraine.
Anything Elizabeth Kolbert writes is a must-read for me; her latest piece in the New Yorker covers how our mining of too much phosphorus and subsequent waste of much of it is choking our oceans while leading towards a bottleneck that threatens our food supply. The article also describes the world’s longest conveyor belt, a 61-mile track in the illegally annexed territory of the Western Sahara.
A former employee came out with claims about malfeasance at a St. Louis medical center that treats transgender youth, telling her story to a newsletter author who doesn’t engage in any sort of fact-checking of stories. The Missouri Independent and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch both investigated and found no corroboration, finding instead that parents had nothing but praise for the center and the treatment their children received. Newsletters are fine for some types of content, but not for actual news.
The New Republic profiled Dr. David Gorski, who has also blogged as Orac, and his battle against pseudoscience, quackery, and so-called “alternative” medicine online. (There is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If it works, it’s medicine.)
I enjoyed this Slate story on the 25^th anniversary of Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the bizarre, cultlike fandom that album has generated. The title track from that record remains one of my favorite songs to play & sing.
The cesspool of Twitter had a debunked conspiracy theory trending earlier this week about Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs. It’s just one of several that Republican legislators there continue to push as they’ve seen the state turn increasingly blue.
There is no “lab leak theory.” There are a bunch of conspiracy theories, but no single, testable theory of how COVID-19 was supposedly engineered in and escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the available evidence points to a zoonotic (natural) origin.
If you saw anything about Washington, D.C., attempting to update its criminal code this week, with hysterical tweets about reducing penalties for certain crimes like carjacking, there’s a lot more to the story. Most of this would be solved by just making the district a state with the same autonomy as the other fifty have.
Arkansas’ new education plan, which includes an extremely broad voucher program, is full of sops to banks and charter-school operators, and it’s also likely to gut public education in the state while favoring higher-income families. Sounds great!
Tennessee jumps on the bandwagon by banning drag shows. There is no evidence any drag show has ever harmed anyone. There is, however, copious evidence that guns have. The choice to ban harmless entertainment should tell you everything about this legislature.
Board game news: Restoration Games announced that they’re retiring the first two Unmatched sets, Cobble & Fog and Robin Hood vs. Big Foot, later this year, with no plans to reprint them.
The Gamefound campaign for Huang, a new game from prolific designer Reiner Knizia, is fully funded with five days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, arizona, arkansas, board game news, conspiracy theories, coronavirus, links, longreads, pseudoscience, russia, science, stick to baseball, tennessee, trans rights, ukraine, washington

→ February 25, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/24/23.

For subscribers to the Athletic, I’ve had several new posts, including a ranking of the top 20 prospects for impact in the majors in 2023 and a draft blog post on the Globe Life College Baseball Showdown, which featured TCU (Brayden Taylor), Vanderbilt (Enrique Bradfield Jr.), and more. I chatted with three of our beat writers about prospects – Dan Connolly about the Orioles’ farm system, Jen McCaffrey about the Red Sox’ farm system, and Dave O’Brien about Atlanta’s farm system.

I’ve done a bunch of podcasts and other interviews in the last few weeks, including the East Village Times’ podcast (Padres), the Seattle Sports Union podcast, the Phillies Nation podcast, WTMJ Milwaukee’s Extra Innings podcast, the Locked on Dodgers podcast, and the Sox Machine podcast (White Sox).

Over at Paste, I reviewed the game Quacks & Co., the kids’ version of the great push-your-luck game The Quacks of Quedlinburg.

On the Keith Law Show this week, I spoke with Fangraphs’ lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen as we compared some of our rankings on our top 100s (here’s his top 100) and discussed the top of this year’s draft class. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I sent out another issue of my free email newsletter on Friday, which marks my sixth so far this year, a better pace than I had in 2022, something I hope to keep up now that I’ll be writing something pretty much every week for the Athletic.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Times Magazine has a long feature on Ghibli Park, a sort-of theme park built around the works of animation legend Hayao Miyazaki.

Ninety-four women allege a Utah doctor sexually assaulted them, but a judge said Utah law makes this medical malpractice and threw their cases out. Utah legislators could just change the law, but they’re too busy trying to kill trans kids.

Air pollution might be causing us to lose our sense of smell.

The Appeal has stories of pregnant people who’ve been shackled and abused while in custody in Harris County, Texas, jails, the same jail system that saw 28 prisoners die last year and four already in 2023.

De la Soul’s catalog is supposed to come to streaming platforms in March. OkayPlayer spoke to the attorney who helped clear most of the samples on their earliest work and made this possible.

Funds from two programs created by then-President Trump’s Department of Agriculture to provide disaster relief to farmers flowed to wealthy landowners instead, such as a $983 payment to the owner of a $23 million mansion right near Trump’s own Mar-a-Lago resort. Over $5.5 million in total funds from those programs went to residents of the 75 wealthiest ZIP codes in the U.S.

The New Republic is one of the few outlets doing real reporting on the effects of the train derailment and chemical release in East Palestine, Ohio, such as this article on dying animals and residents’ respiratory distress, and this editorial on the fake conspiracy theories around it and the real corruption that allowed it all to happen.

There’s a network of neo-Nazi home-schoolers operating in Ohio, and the state says they can’t do anything about it. Maybe if they were teaching critical race theory and trans rights?

Biden’s EPA has streamlined a program to approve alternatives to fossil fuels that originally covered biofuels but also includes fuels made from recycled plastics – even though one such process is likely to release a highly carcinogenic byproduct into the atmosphere. And the EPA won’t release details of the process, right down to the names of the chemicals involved.

The majority-Black city of Jackson, Mississippi, is likely to end up with a separate, state-run court district with judges appointed entirely by white politicians, thanks to a Republican-authored bill that already passed the state’s lower chamber.

A police officer in Pueblo County, Colorado, shot and killed an unarmed man in the car line outside a school because the man got into the wrong car by mistake. Video shows the officer gave no warning and neither he nor his partner gave the victim, 32-year-old Richard Ward, any assistance as he bled to death on the ground. The DA declined to charge the officers, saying they “justifiably feared for their lives.”

A publisher planned to revise several of Roald Dahl’s books to remove potentially offensive language, but after criticism it appears they relented. I have a lot of thoughts on this, most of them opposing the effort. You can’t undo history, and art is a comment and reflection of its time. With a children’s book, you always have the choice not to read the book to your kids, or to read it in full and explain why some language or imagery is inappropriate or offensive. I’m also not sure what good this does for books with millions of copies in print.

New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker has a history of activism through his work and his social media commentary. He also criticized journalists who argued that the paper’s coverage of trans issues has been slanted when he co-signed a letter calling them “activists.”

From the Onion: It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible.

The chaos and breakdowns within Twitter hampered rescue efforts after this month’s earthquake that killed thousands in Turkey and Syria.

Russia used state media to support Canada’s so-called “Freedom Convoy” that protested the country’s attempts to limit the spread of COVID-19.

I grew up in Smithtown, New York, and from kindergarten through twelfth grade I attended public schools in that district, which is now further embarrassing itself by adding armed guards at its schools despite no actual evidence that these prevent mass shootings.

Board game news: The small publisher Holy Grail Games announced they’re shutting down.

25^th Century Games has a Kickstarter up for three new tile-laying games: Agueda, Color Field, and Donut Shop. As of Friday morning it’s less than $2000 away from its funding goal.

The Search for Lost Species is over 11x funded already on Kickstarter; it’s the sequel to The Search for Planet X, my #1 game of 2020.

The Kickstarter for the last standalone expansion for Set a Watch is also fully funded, with just five days to go.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, children's literature, environment, hip-hop, japan, links, longreads, mississippi, miyazaki, ohio, police, russia, social media, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp, utah

→ February 11, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/11/23.

My top 100 prospects and team reports have been running for the last 12 days, finishing up today with the AL West team reports/top 20s. You can see the index of everything I’ve written here, which includes direct links to the reports for every team, the top 100, the farm system rankings, my chats on that site, and more.

My latest review for Paste actually went up last week, and even I missed it in all the hubbub. I reviewed the board game It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, the two-person variant of the popular game It’s a Wonderful World, but I have to say I think the original is a better game, even for two people. It’s a bit like 7 Wonders meets Century Spice Road, but with a little more to it than that might imply. You can buy It’s a Wonderful World here on amazon if you’re intrigued.

My free email newsletter has been almost-weekly this year, and I’ll send out the next iteration this weekend. I skipped my podcast this week because I was writing so much. I think it’ll be back next week. Maybe. Life is full of uncertainties.

And now, the links…

The Toronto Star looks at the fall of Jamie Salé into conspiracy theory and denialism. The 2002 Olympic gold medalist, previously best known as one of the two skaters originally cheated out of the gold by corrupt judges, has become a COVID and vaccine denialist – and, of course, now she’s trying to profit off these false views.

The Hollywood Reporter has more details on the implosion of Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland’s animation empire in the wake of his arrest on domestic abuse charges and multiple former co-workers detailing harassment by Roiland.

Intelligencer looks at the increasing “junkification” of Amazon, where legitimate products are getting harder to find as the company tries to muscle its way into more spaces. My outsider’s take: this is what happens when a company needs unbridled growth to prop up a stock price (or a billionaire owner’s wealth).

The right-wing propaganda site Revolver states that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R )’s takeover of that state’s schools, including the previously progressive New College of Florida, is the blueprint Republicans need to use to take down public education across the country. (The article also says that African American studies is “a joke of a subject,” if you doubt my characterization of Revolver’s leanings.)

Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer because engagement on the billionaire’s tweets is low. Totally stable genius there.
Twitter glitched for me twice this week – once when we all got the “exceeded the daily limit” warning, and once when the app showed me misplaced white boxes where certain tweets should have appeared in my timeline. Former employees say this is due to a series of code freezes and Musk’s frequent, mercurial demands for changes.

The BBC profiles the French author Colette, calling her “the most beloved French writer of all time,” although in the English-speaking world she’s probably best known for writing the novel Gigi that became a hit musical and film.

Native American groups are protesting the Kansas City NFL team’s nickname, mascot, and their use of the embarrassing “tomahawk chop.” Atlanta baseball fans, pay attention.

A Montana bill would prevent schools from punishing students who intentionally misgender or deadname classmates. Just say bullying is allowed and be done with it.

Is disdain for the less educated the “last acceptable prejudice,” as Michael Sandel writes in the New York Times? He also argues that it’s a problem for the Democrats, and a perception they need to shed.

Voice actors are being asked to sign away rights to their own voices so studios can create AI versions and save a few bucks.

Tony Dungy and James Brown (the NFL announcer) have withdrawn from their speaking slots at an event hosted by an anti-gay Pharisee preacher.

Republicans are not serious about governing, except when it comes to using the government as a weapon against their enemies, which is, you know, what fascist regimes do.

Also in Florida, the state is going to pass legislation to end Disney’s extra-governmental Reedy Creek Improvement District as retaliation for the company’s opposition to the state’s anti-LGBT “don’t say gay” law. See the previous bullet point.

Attempts to erase Black history from curricula, as Florida is doing, end up doing nothing except leaving students less literate in American history, rather than getting them to “love” the U.S. more, writes education Prof. Adam Laats in the Washington Post.

By the way, sometimes pressure works, even on zealots: Florida’s interscholastic sports committee has dropped plans to make questions about athletes’ menstrual cycles mandatory. It was a blatant attempt to out trans kids, of course, although they claimed otherwise.

Missouri’s Republican-led legislature rejected a measure to ban children from carrying guns in public.

Iowa Republicans introduced a bill that would expand child labor in the state, including jobs previously deemed too dangerous for kids like those in mining, logging, and animal slaughterhouses.

A professor at the University of Wyoming tweeted about a former student of hers who was trans and killed themselves. Legislatures passing laws attacking trans people, especially trans kids, are destroying lives just to score political points.

We’re seeing fewer big scientific breakthroughs, with the pace dropping steadily for over three-quarters of a century. Part of it is that breakthroughs are harder to come by as the low-hanging fruit is long picked, and part is that nations don’t invest in basic science research without promise of immediate financial returns the way they used to.

Over 200 people have been quarantined and at least 8 have died in Equatorial Guinea from an as-yet unidentified hemorrhagic fever (a category that includes dengue and the Ebola and Marburg filoviruses).

Board game news: Allplay (formerly known as Board Game Tables) has a Kickstarter up for four new small box games, with pledges starting at $19 for any one of the titles.

Rock Manor Games has a Kickstarter, already over 400% funded, for the new expansion to the game Set a Watch.

This blog post arguing that Dominion killed replayability in board games makes a great point – the need to constantly buy expansions to is a great business model for a very small number of games/publishers but not sustainable for the industry as a whole.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, disney, florida, football, french literature, iowa, links, longreads, metoo, missouri, montana, racism, science, social media, stick to baseball, trans rights

→ February 4, 2023
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/4/23.

My top 100 prospects ranking ran on Monday for subscribers to The Athletic, followed by the players who just missed the list, and then my ranking of all 30 farm systems. I held a Q&A on Monday, which the site excerpted for a separate article. I also held an old-fashioned Klawchat here on Friday. The team-by-team top 20s will start to run on Monday.

On The Keith Law Show, I spoke with Steve Ives, writer and director of the upcoming documentary Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History, which will run on PBS’s American Experience and stream online on February 20^th. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ve been keeping up better with my free email newsletter recently, and I’ll get back to it again this upcoming week once I get through the last nine team reports.

And now, the links…

The Atavist has the story of a family caught up in the world of YouTube influencers, including one star’s mother accused of inappropriate behavior against a number of her daughter’s co-stars.

Mother Jones looks at the troll site Kiwi Farms, and how driving it offline hasn’t worked to stop its users’ campaigns of doxing and harassment.

The new emerging microbe threat around the world? Infectious fungi taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic by exploiting people with damaged immune systems.

Cory Doctorow examines what he calls the “enshittification” of TikTok and other sites that built up massive user bases on one premise and then switched to another model to make some money – a digital bait and switch of sorts.

The New Yorker looks at NY Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul, whose columns seem designed to push buttons and have often engaged in TERF-like arguments.

Chuck D spoke to Rolling Stone about the new documentary series Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, available now via PBS.

Even a mild case of COVID-19 leads to a massive increase in heart disease risk.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced a plan to block all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at state colleges.

Dan Rather wrote about DeSantis’ platform of white grievance.

Florida teachers are removing all books from their classroom for fear of prosecution by the white police state. Here’s more on the policy behind this.

Meanwhile, the craven College Board, whose entire business model is built around making it more expensive for students to go to college, bowed to pressure from DeSantis and eviscerated its A.P. African American Studies curriculum.

Republicans continue to push anti-abortion laws, proposing 105 bills and counting just this year alone, even subverting democratic norms to do so. They’re also forum-shopping to try to ban the abortion pill.

Abortion bans often include exceptions for rape or incest. They’re mostly meaningless, there to make people feel better about discriminatory laws against providing medical care.

Utah passed a law banning transition health care for trans kids.

Arizona’s legislature passed a law allowing lawmakers to delete all emails after 90 days, which isn’t suspicious at all.

Some businesses are warning Missouri lawmakers their culture war is going to harm the state’s economy.

An off-duty cop in Providence, RI, shot an unarmed kid, and a jury acquitted him of all charges.

Georgia cops killed a protestor fighting the construction of a massive training facility in the woods around Atlanta. They’re claiming he shot first. I do not take the word of police as truth.

Texas election deniers raised funds to build a mobile hospital in Ukraine. They failed, and it’s not clear where the donated money went.

Harvard Prof. John Comaroff has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, leading to a mass walkout of his first class back from suspension last week.

Tom Verlaine, founder of the essential American art-punk band Television, died last week at age 73.

Many consumers say that tipping is getting out of control. This isn’t a yes/no question, really; I think you can say tipping for some services is obligatory, and for others is unnecessary.

Noted free speech absolutist Elon Musk took down a video critical of India’s hypernationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the government’s request.

The FBI infiltrated a major ransomware group called Hive, gaining the group’s decryption keys to allow victims to recover their locked files.

Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson asks, “Can we please just let the M&M’s fuck?”

The Guardian looks at Daybreak, the upcoming cooperative board game about climate change co-designed by Matt Leacock (Pandemic, Forbidden Island).

The role-playing game based on the Hugo-winning novel The Fifth Season is now on Backerkit.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, arizona, board game news, coronavirus, georgia, harvard, links, longreads, missouri, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, texas, trans rights, utah

→ 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 31, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/31/22.

I skipped last Saturday’s post, since it was Christmas Eve (iiin the drunk tank…), but since the last roundup I’ve written up the Daulton Varsho/Gabriel Moreno trade and the still in-limbo Carlos Correa signing with the Mets.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best new board games of 2022, and posted reviews of two of them – Kites, a real-time cooperative game; and Lacrimosa, a heavier game based on the life of Mozart. For those of you interested in my board game content, I’m going to do some small giveaways of promos and small expansions via my Instagram account starting this week, so feel free to follow me there if you’re interested.

I’ve got a bunch of non-work writing to do this weekend before I get back to prospect calls on Monday, with a new issue of my free email newsletter next up once this post is done.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This is about two weeks old, but the New York Times had an extremely in-depth investigative report on the toll of Putin’s war on Ukraine.
This week in “anti-abortion laws are going to kill women,” a woman in Louisiana was having a miscarriage and two ERs turned her away because they were afraid of prosecution under the state’s draconian anti-abortion law.
Meanwhile, an Arizona anti-abortion law has allowed a man to sue the clinic that gave his ex-wife an abortion, claiming wrongful death.
I know there was A Discourse around this article, but you should read the actual piece about the so-called “nepo babies” that ran in Vulture, as it’s more nuanced and thoughtful than the title or cover might imply.
Also from the New York Times’ investigative unit, this December 19^th story started the flood of revelations about Representative-Elect George Santos’s fictional resume.
Rolling Stone talked to Dave Coutts, the singer of the 1990s band Talk Show, which was Stone Temple Pilots without singer Scott Weiland, about his experience in that one-album band and his post-music career.
The hoax about computerized voting machines that flipped votes from Trump to Biden comes from a longtime fraudster named Dennis Montgomery, who sold a bunch of his so-called evidence to Mike Lindell and also has a history of selling bogus information to the federal government.
Des Moines, Iowa, removed police “school resource officers” from schools and tried restorative practices instead. In These Times looks at some of the results from the first year, where arrests dropped by about 80% but police calls only increased from 9 to 13. Not really mentioned is that this system, in addition to improving outcomes and keeping more kids in school and out of prison, is how much less it costs taxpayers, too.
Slate’s Justin Peters wrote about the finale of the “great Internet grievance wars” and what the so-called Twitter files actually say, even as some loud right-wing accounts on the site are still complaining about “shadowbanning” as we speak.
Aaron Rupar wrote about his experiences getting suspended from Twitter by a petulant Elon Musk. This came as the billionaire claimed an Internet account was responsible for a stalker trying to find him, even though police found no link.
Two journalists for the Bend Bulletin were reporting on the impact of a severe cold snap on the city’s homeless, and decided to get involved to try to help one such woman despite the dictum that journalists shouldn’t become part of any story they cover.
Texas hired a man to train school board members, even though he’d been convicted twice of defrauding federal agencies. Of course, this training was supposed to be an alternative to so-called “woke” agendas. Grifters have realized how easy it is to target these people.
Vox has a list of seven reasons why the planet might not actually be doomed, based on the proceedings at this month’s COP15 summit in Montréal.
This New York Times story on a South Korean tour group that was stranded in Buffalo by the snow, only to find themselves taken in by a local couple who just happened to have a bunch of Korean ingredients in their kitchen, is both a rare bit of good news and a testament to the power of food to bring people together.
The anti-vaxxers and other COVID denialists who’ve sown distrust and ignorance around COVID vaccine have led to rises in chicken pox, measles, and other vaccine-preventable diseases as the dupes fooled by their misinformation are now skipping other critical vaccines.
The Atlantic points out that Republicans’ anti-vaccine policies have killed more Republicans than Democrats, although the article doesn’t try to pinpoint a death toll from this.
Meanwhile, Florida’s hyperpartisan Supreme Court has impaneled a grand jury to “investigate” COVID-19 vaccines. I assume they’ll find whatever Gov. DeSantis tells them to find.
DeSantis also reached out to Chaya Raichik, the hatemonger behind the anti-LGBTQ LibsOfTikTok account, after her identity became public, offering to hide her at his Governor’s Mansion even though she is a California resident. I don’t understand why Florida taxpayers are okay with this sort of use of their money, but it appears they are.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, environment, florida, frauds, iowa, lgbt rights, links, longreads, Music, police, russia, stick to baseball, texas, 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

→ December 10, 2022
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/10/22.

I’ve written a lot for the Athletic over the last two weeks, reacting to:

José Abreu signing with Houston
Zach Eflin signing with Tampa Bay
Jacob deGrom signing with Texas
Justin Verlander signing with the Mets
Trea Turner signing with the Phillies
The Andrew Heaney and Josh Bell signings
Aaron Judge re-signing with the Yankees
Willson Contreras signing with St. Louis
Five signings in one: Masataka Yoshida, Kenley Jansen, Jameson Taillon, Cody Bellinger, José Quintana
The Xander Bogaerts and Brandon Nimmo signings
Fred McGriff’s selection to the Hall of Fame

Over at Paste, I wrapped up everything I played or saw at PAX Unplugged last weekend. That board game convention is why I didn’t run this post last week, of course. I’ll have my best new games of 2022 post up this upcoming week.

On my podcast, I spoke to Prof. Scott Hershovitz, author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, about his book and some of the big themes in it. You can buy the book here, and you can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker has a truly remarkable profile of Metallica as they finish up their eleventh album, 72 Seasons, which comes out in April.

Esquire has the story of Robert Telles, former Clark County Public Administrator, now charged with murdering the Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter who exposed his misdeeds in public office.

Mississippi, a backwater region in the American South that ranks 50^th among all states for health care, 43^rd in education, and 49^th for its economy, took funds from a federal program aimed at helping poor families with children and used them to pay for volleyball practice facility at Southern Miss that Brett Favre had promised to pay for. They also paid $1.1 million from the same program to pay Favre for services never performed. In a functioning democracy, there’d be at least an investigation in the legislature into current Gov. Tate Reeves (R), but Mississippi is gerrymandered into oblivion and has disenfranchised 15% of Black residents, giving Republicans a supermajority in both houses, so nothing will happen.

ProPublica exposes the abuses at a private school in Washington state that took taxpayer money while failing to protect or educate high-risk kids.

ProPublica normally does great work, but they ran a garbage story about the debunked lab-leak hypothesis for COVID-19’s origins, and it was rife with obvious mistakes.

There’s a ridiculous anti-vax film circulating online, called Died Suddenly, which is so shoddy that it claims that people who are indisputably alive actually died from the COVID-19 vaccine. Other anti-vaxxers are attacking it, saying it’s hurting their (bogus) cause. If you want more information on the various lies of Died Suddenly, much of which focuses on false claims of blood clots, you can find a lengthy takedown here on Science-Based Medicine.

Grant Wahl, an acclaimed and respected soccer writer who has been an outspoken critic of the World Cup and the human rights abuses taking place in Qatar, died last night at a World Cup game. He was 48.

Even as the Biden Administration tries to get major social media sites like Facebook to curb COVID misinformation, it’s thriving on fringe sites like Gab.

Elon Musk has claimed protecting children is one of his top priorities as the owner of Twitter, but he’s laid off a huge chunk of the site’s child safety team.

Ads appear on the pages of white nationalists Musk has unbanned from Twitter. I really don’t understand why any company would keep buying ads on the site right now.

Meanwhile, Musk’s advisers appear to include a bunch of right-wing trolls, and the site has been banning a number of left-wing activists’ accounts.

DonorsTrust, a dark-money, right-wing PAC, took in $425 million in anonymous contributions from just two donors in 2021. Not sure how this is compatible with democracy over the long term.

A lobbyist for a Saudi alfalfa company that has been has been elected to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, where he would have influence over a dispute about water usage in the state. Thomas Galvin’s employer grows alfalfa with scarce water in Arizona and ships it to Saudi Arabia to feed livestock there.

Michael Harriot dismantled the defenses of Jerry Jones after a photo emerged of the Cowboys’ owner, who has never hired a Black coach, at the door of a school in 1957 where white students blocked Black kids from integrating.

FIRE, which often defends conservatives on college campuses who feel their free speech rights have been abrogated, has an editorial calling out Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” as a violation of the First Amendment.

A naturopath claiming to be a doctor has been sentenced to three years in prison for selling fake vaccine cards. An ND is not a real doctor and naturopathy is woo.

New Zealand took guardianship of a baby who needed a life-saving blood transfusion because the parents refused to allow it unless the blood were “unvaccinated,” which isn’t even a thing. This is what misinformation about vaccines gets us.

A number of mainstream outlets have posted “just asking questions” pieces about gender-affirming care, including the New York Times. This Teen Vogue piece gets at what’s wrong with them. Science-Based Medicine has a longer read on everything that was wrong in that Times piece that attacked puberty blockers. Meanwhile, the Telegraph ran five anti-trans pieces on a single page last week.

Hardly still news at this point, but it’s worth reiterating that Trump hosted white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago, and most Republicans couldn’t even muster the courage to say this was bad.

Have American right-wing candidates gotten too weird?

The Uihleins, owners of the packaging supplies company U-Line, have partnered with an election denial organization in Arizona called Restoration Action, Inc. You should not buy anything from U-Line, ever.

The 20-year-old son of Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (R), who claimed the entire territory of the state “for Jesus,” was stopped by police while drinking, with gun case, in a vehicle, although he wasn’t driving. He pulled the “my dad’s the governor” card.

Why does the media continue to take billionaires at their word? Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried … they promise things that the media just accepts without question, and then don’t deliver, or it turns out they were lying.

Speaking of which, the forces trying to get public funding for a new stadium for the Titans have made a lot of big promises of economic returns. Turns out they’re probably exaggerating.

Back in high school, Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Secretary of State (R), “willed” a classmate “a rope and a tree” as part of a series of racist jokes he and friends made in the class yearbook.

The Brevard County Sheriff seems to be planning to impose corporal discipline in the county’s schools, with the help of the school board and new superintendent.

HarperCollins, publisher of both of my books, issued a response to the ongoing strike by the HCP Guild, which is asking for better pay, better diversity initiatives, and more security for union members.

National Geographic has some of the details scientists have learned about the massive 2021 volcanic explosion on the Pacific island nation of Tonga.

Board game news: Mapping the World, a new game about cartography, is only halfway to its goal with just two days to go on Kickstarter.

Empire’s End, a new citybuilder from John D. Clair (Mystic Vale, Space Base), is 4x funded with five days to go on Kickstarter.

Aelderman, a resource-management Euro game that looks like it’s in the Orléans mold, just passed its funding goal on Kickstarter this week.

Shake that City!, a sort of roll-and-place puzzle game from Alderac, is also fully funded with four days to go. You shake a device with nine cubes in it and they come out in a random pattern that tells you how to place the related tiles on your board.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, board game news, dark money, florida, links, longreads, metal, misinformation, mississippi, nevada, ohio, science, soccer, social media, stick to baseball, true crime, vaccines

Stick to baseball, 3/4/23.

Stick to baseball, 12/31/22.

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