Stick to baseball, 5/27/17.

My one Insider piece this week was on Luis Robert, his deal with the White Sox, and the poor history of Cuban position player free agents. I did not hold a Klawchat, and will have another mock draft up on Tuesday.

Smart Baseball continues to sell well and I am very grateful to all of you who purchased it. I have about 100 signed bookplates that I can send out to readers who’ve bought the book, and I’ll get that info to everyone soon – probably in my next email newsletter.

And now, the links…

• Longread: Pro Publica exposes abusive working conditions at Case Farms, the chicken purveyor that provides meat to many major brands including KFC, Taco Bell, Popeye’s, and Boar’s Head. Skip those brands if you’re horrified by what you read here.
• Another longread: The Guardian looks at the great London property squeeze, as affordable housing disappears from the metropolis. The same is happening in some American cities – New York and San Francisco come to mind – where many people who work in the city can’t afford to live in or even close to the city. I’m talking about people you expect to be there, like teachers, first responders, even the ‘invisible’ workers in restaurant kitchens and late-night cleaning crews. They need and deserve a place to live.
• Make Michigan sick again! A Republican lawmaker there claims rules to let parents opt out of vaccination mandates hurt ‘parental rights,’ oblivious to the irony that it hurts the rights of those parents’ kids to avoid preventable diseases. All religious and philosophical exemptions for vaccinations should be eliminated, period. The science on this is as unequivocal as it gets.
• The Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel explains how the Seth Rich conspiracy hoax shows how fake news still works, which was followed two days later by a piece from Rich’s parents asking these nutjobs to stop politicizing their son’s murder. Fox News blowhard Sean Hannequin has taken a “vacation” in the wake of his own reprehensible role in promulgating this insanity. If you want to see how incredibly stupid, gullible, and obstinate otherwise normal-seeming people can be, search Rich’s name on Twitter. But really, don’t do that.
• The last 50 years of climate change have brought exceptional plant growth to Antarctica.
• Actress-turned-loon Gwyneth Paltrow said recently that anyone who wants to “fuck with” her needs to “bring (their) A-game,” to which one scientist responds, we’re not fucking with you, we’re correcting you.
• The NY Times looks at Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ (@ev) quixotic quest to ‘fix’ the Internet by developing a new model for selling content. I don’t think it’s going to work.
• A South African hunter was crushed to death by an elephant after it is fatally shot. I have just one question: Why the hell are we still shooting elephants?
• A sociology professor from Occidental College (not the deliberate one) writes in TIME that all universities should ban fraternities. I think she gets half the argument right; what she misses is how such social ‘clubs’ can also serve to undermine institutional efforts to fight discrimination and allow wealthy kids to isolate themselves from less privileged classmates – and thus to reinforce the old boys’ network that came about when universities were limited to families who could afford the tuition up front. (That’s the main purpose of “finals clubs,” Harvard’s unofficial, not-exactly-banned alternatives to fraternities, which are under attack and yet have been defended by unlikely voices. I was not a member of any finals club.)
• Gunning for Snowflake of the Year honors, Alabama’s Governor Kay Ivey (a Republican) signed a bill preventing local governments from removing Confederate monuments. Remember, this is the same GOP that preaches decentralizing power from the federal government to the states. It’s almost as if the Republican party’s core platform is based on self-interest rather than actual principle.
• Not to be outdone, Ayatollah Greg Abbott of Texas joked about shooting reporters just two days after now Representative-elect Greg Gianforte physically assaulted a reporter who asked him about Trumpcare.
• The City of Commerce, Texas, is under attack after its police chief illegally let his 14-year-old drive, then accosted and arrested a black woman for driving around them, calling her a “black bitch.” The City has denied the woman’s claim that Crews called her that term, but has offered no explanation for why she was forced to spend a night in jail; she claims it was because she refused to apologize to whoever called her that slur.
• A Baltimore attorney was arrested this week for offering a rape victim $3000 to decline to testify, then threatening to deport her.
• Morrissey (as in the Smiths) has outed himself as a bigot, especially when it comes to Islam.
• An African-American student at Bowie State University was killed by a white University of Maryland student in what authorities are bizarrely not calling a hate crime even though the suspect was a member of a Facebook group that called itself “alt-Reich.”
• Meanwhile, the man accused of killing two people on a Portland, Oregon, train is a well-known white supremacist in that area. The victims had tried to intervene when the killer was harassing two Muslim women on the vehicle.
• Is the key to fighting superbugs ending our war on less harmful bacteria? In other words, does every bacterial infection need antibiotics? The more we dose ourselves (and our pets and our livestock) with such drugs, the faster we end up with bacteria our drugs can’t kill because we create a process of unnatural selection.
• Our President is now actively hurting the U.S. dollar. Add to the list of things I thought Republicans would care about, but that they’re ignoring because it’s inconvenient.
• More from Pro Publica: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is a landlord from hell.
• Charles Blow wrote las week for the New York Times that there was blood in the water around this Presidency … and in five days it has already been lapped by new disclosures of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
• Could economic stratification and ecological strain lead to the collapse of western civilization? Of course, the United States is doing its best to find an even faster and more efficient way to achieve the same end.
• A physician wrote about the potential disaster of the Administration’s anti-abortion views and proposed policies, which she says “are not grounded in reliable evidence.” The money quote, not just on reproductive rights but this entire Administration: “These appointments are a stunning example of what happens when willful ignorance gains a powerful platform.”