Stick to baseball, 7/16/16.

Busy week for me over at the four-letter, with my updated ranking of the top 50 prospects in the minors going up on Thursday, four days after I watched and wrote about the Futures Game.

I wrote up Boston’s trade for Drew Pomeranz and their trades for Brad Ziegler and Aaron Hill. And I held a Klawchat.

I’m not writing up the Yuliesky Gurriel signing but Chris Crawford did, with a tiny bit of help from me.

I also appeared on Alex Speier’s 108 Stitches podcast, discussing the Pomeranz deal and the Red Sox’ farm system.

And now, the links…

• There’s a measles outbreak in Arizona that started in a prison and spread because of unvaccinated employees. They’re a bunch of idiots. Vaccinate your kids, now. Vaccines are safe but measles kills.
• The Hannah Poling case, long touted by anti-vaxxer morons as ‘proving’ something or other about vaccines being bad, does not afford any support to the notion that vaccinations can contribute to the causation of autism. Full stop. That’s from the Special Masters in the court who oversaw the decision.
• The first major lawsuit against California’s eminently sensible, thoroughly constitutional mandatory vaccination law looks like a baseless hunk of garbage. Try not to have a heart attack and die from that surprise.
• The Ringer – I swear I’ve heard of this site somewhere before – has an outstanding profile/history of the most important comic strip ever, Bloom County.
• Turmeric is the trendy new ingredient, in part because it may some unproven anti-inflammatory properties. It can also irritate your stomach and cause heartburn, so, you know, don’t overdo it.
• A superb piece from Roth Cornet, departing editor of Hitfix, on Finding Dory and her own experiences with dyslexia.
• Turkey is in turmoil; here’s why the deposition of Recep Tayyip Erdogan isn’t a bad thing.
• The Brickyard in St. Albans (in the UK) has a fantastic safety-first policy for female patrons posted behind the bar (although I assume they’d do the same if a male patron had a similar problem). Every bar or restaurant should have the same – perhaps even with a code word (ask for a specific name that would tip off the bartender that this is a distress call) to make it clear.
• Writer and comedian Jessi Klein says pregnant women should just get the epidural and she’s right. The counterarguments are nearly all variations of the appeal to nature fallacy. Science is good. Medicine is good. Pain, though … pain sucks.
• A deranged ex-soldier gets a gun, executes a bunch of cops sniper-style, and the NRA’s message is unchanged.
• The great short story writer George Saunders went to Trump rallies and painted a real portrait of his base, without resorting to caricature or dismissal. They come off more as bad libertarians with a case of xenophobia.
• Popular Science makes the case that Trump’s VP choice Mike Pence is strongly anti-science. Not mentioned is that Pence’s office opposed a state bill to try to increase Indiana’s vaccination rate against HPV, or that he supports so-called gay “conversion” therapy.
• Speaking of which, Atul Gawande weighs in on the increasing mistrust of science, especially among conservatives.
• Why are police all over the country arresting people for criticizing cops? Isn’t at least some of this protected speech?
• A new study of hostile sexist behavior in video gaming shows men who harass women online are “low status” in the first place. In other words, they are literally the worst.
• Phillips Exeter Academy punished a student who sexually assaulted another student by making him deliver bread to her once a week. Yeah.
• Microfibers are poisoning the planet’s waters according to a study funded by Patagonia, the clothing manufacturer responsible for putting some of those microfibers into circulation.
• Consumer demand for organic and non-GMO foods is leading Big Ag to pay farmers to go organic. This is sort of good; industrial organic is better than traditional industrial agriculture, but still isn’t as sustainable as what you might call “true” organic, which involves less spraying of anything and more focus on soil health. Organic farming can still include dumping a lot of chemicals on the soil, but they’re natural (e.g., no synthetic nitrogen from petroleum) so people assume they’re less harmful and/or the food is more healthful.
• Baylor is burying its scandal by avoiding any paper trail. The important thing for us to do here is to make sure they can’t forget it by continuing to talk about it, for people like Jess Luther and Dan Solomon to keep investigating and reporting.
• The show Roadies made a whole episode depicting sexual assault as funny. In 2016.
• People with autism can, in fact, read emotions and feel empathy, contrary to the popular stereotype.