My ranking of the top 100 prospects went up this week, and my org rankings went up last week, so ESPN set up a landing page that links to all my prospect content. When the individual team top tens and reports go up next week, you’ll be able to reach them from this page as well.
ESPN split my top 100 ranking into five posts this year, twenty prospects per page, so here they are from the top to the bottom:
- Prospects #20 to #1
- Prospects #40 to #21
- Prospects #60 to #41
- Prospects #80 to #61
- Prospects #100 to #81
- Prospects who just missed the list
I held a Klawchat Friday after the whole list was up.
And I even got another boardgame review up, this one of the new edition of the 2000 game Citadels, which is actually designed for 4 to 8 players, with rules variants included for 2 or 3. It’s definitely best with four or more, though.
You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon, or from other sites via the Harper-Collins page for the book. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.
And now, the links…
- Aziz Ansari takes Trump to task for his anti-Muslim rhetoric in this NY Times editorial.
- The House of Representatives quietly changed a rule that will make it easier for the federal government to sell off national park lands, or to transfer them to the states and let the states sell them.
- The Environmental Protection Agency froze its grant programs and slapped a gag order on employees. This is happening all over the executive branch, apparently, such as the adminstration’s “control-alt-delete” strategy on climate change policy. These orders led to a series of “rogue” Twitter accounts that ostensibly will allow employees of those agencies to still leak information to the public – if those accounts are what they say they are. TIME‘s Jeffrey Kluger says Trump will lose his war on science, but doesn’t quite point out that we may all be losers before science eventually wins.
- Do you live in Iowa? If so, your state’s GOP is pushing a bill to expand non-medical exemptions to vaccinations for schoolchildren. This is dangerous and utterly baseless. Call your state representatives and senators Monday and tell them to stop this madness.
- Do you live in Kansas? That state’s GOP has introduced a bill defining a person’s “sex” by their chromosomes, and of course, they’re pitching it as a “student privacy and protection act,” despite zero instances of any actual violation of the privacy or safety of cis students. It’s flagrantly anti-trans, but, as with all these bills, ignores people who are not born male or female, collectively called intersex. It’s a hate bill, and even worse, it’s government-sponsored religion. Call your state representatives and senators Monday and tell them to stop this madness.
- Do you live in South Dakota? Well your state GOP is actively subverting your right to vote on laws, reversing a voter-passed ethics reform package and now trying to double the number of signatures required to place something on the ballot in the first place. Do they run the state for themselves, or do they run it for the people? Call your state representatives and senators Monday and tell them to stop this madness.
- Do you live in Pennsylvania? Well your state GOP gerrymandered the hell out of your state, with one district around Philly ranked among the ten “most rigged” districts in the country. This is a tougher change, because fixing it would require an amendment to the state constitution, but still, call your state reps and senators Monday and ask how to fix this so that neither party gets to do this in 2020.
- Net neutrality, a fundamental principle of the open internet, is about to die after Ajit Pai became head of the FCC. It’s probably too late to stop this one – Trump’s election made this a fait accompli – I still say call your Representative and Senators on Monday to say you support net neutrality and want the Open Internet Order to remain in effect.
- Sean Spicer, Trump’s Press Secretary, has killed the traditional way the media reports on a President.
- Two great pieces from Esquire‘s Charles Pierce: on last week’s Women’s March and on Trump’s rabid bullshitting in his interview with ABC News. The latter piece also points out the major, major problem that Trump’s brand of absurdity covers up: A fringe, conservative, and often evangelical wing of the Republican Party is now dismantling social and environmental programs that have been in place for decades. Do most Trump voters know what rights and benefits they’re about to lose?
- Dan Savage has revived his 2006 site and fundraising campaign ITMFA, which stands for something you can figure out by clicking. I never believed W was worthy of impeachment, for the record. He turned out to be an unsuccessful President, but that’s wholly different from what we’re facing now.
- A neo-Nazi who’d been walking around the University of Florida campus wearing a swastika armband drew protests and was later “jumped” by two men who ripped the armband off him. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t feel too sorry for the guy.
- The Guardian looks at the incredible shrinking printed circuit board, which they call the vanishing computer. Intel, AMD, and their ilk are now printing transistors so small and so close together that they’re reaching the physical limits of what’s possible. We can’t make transistors any smaller because we’re at the atomic level here, and that means our devices, which have been increasing in speed and power for four decades, are hitting a wall.
- One of the very, very few positives that might come out of a Republican Administration and Congress is a renewed emphasis on nuclear power, which environmentalists have opposed even though it doesn’t contribute to climate change. NuScale Power has applied to build the country’s first small, “modular” reactor, and within that article there’s a mention of a company trying to bring back the molten salt reactor design, which runs on ‘spent’ nuclear fuel from light-water reactors.
- A law professor in Alabama fought a traffic ticket and turned it into a constitutional rights question. It’s funny, but also disturbing, given how much the city’s mayor clings to the cameras even after orders to stop using them, in part because a private company is profiting from their usage.
- The woman who accused, under oath, Emmett Till of grabbing her fabricated her testimony. She’s now 82, and maybe feels some guilt, but will get away with ensuring that the murderers of a 14-year-old black boy got off scot-free.
- Are we entering a post-statistics democracy, where populist distrust of traditional statistics is undermining our society, and traditional methods of gathering statistics may tell us less about our populations than they did in the past?
- This piece is from 2013 but was relevant to some Twitter idiocy I encountered this week: we don’t need vitamin supplements, although the supplements industry would like us to think otherwise.
- In December, a woman of Indian descent was stopped and questioned by police for “walking while brown,” in her words. One officer questioned if she was here illegally.
- In Finland, people drink a milder, possibly more healthful coffee that’s mixed with dried mushrooms. I like coffee too much to try this, and also the article put this song in my head.
- Hey girl, Ryan Gosling doesn’t understand how he became a meme.
- This Onion article hit a little to close to home: Explanation Of Board Game Rules Peppered With Reassurances That It Will Be Fun. But why pick on Ticket to Ride in the photo, when that game’s rules are easy? Have the authors ever seen the rules for Caverna or Android: Netrunner?