For subscribers to the Athletic, I updated my ranking of the top 50 prospects currently in the minor leagues and then wrote about five prospects who’ve fallen off so far this year. One of them, Adael Amador, is actually in the midst of a hilarious run where he’s hit 6 homers in his last 9 games after hitting just one in his first 37 games … and he’s still only hitting .194/.337/.329!
I’ll be back on Stadium on Monday for Diamond Dreams at 2 pm ET, one segment on Unpacked at around 2:40 pm ET, and possibly a segment on The Rally in the 5 o’clock hour.
I’m at Disharoon Park again today for game 2 of Kansas State vs. Virginia, so I’m rushing to get this posted. So now, the links…
- So much from ProPublica this week I’ll give them their own section: Several of Trump’s witnesses in his various trials have received substantial financial benefits from his media company, including raises and promotions. PP’s investigations into how Illinois schools worked in tandem with police to punish students have now led to two civil rights complaints. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has not fulfilled her promise to stop Nestlé from taking groundwater for free while Flint and other towns lack for clean drinking water.
- AIPAC is pushing huge amounts of dark money to defeat members of the so-called “Squad” in the House of Representatives. More than half of that money is coming from CEOs of major U.S. corporations. The Squad members’ crime? Opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza.
- The theocracy in Texas remains strong, as the state’s Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Texas’s draconian anti-abortion laws, with the backing of the state’s right-wing Attorney General Ken Paxton. When the Astros offered me a front-office job in 2012, one of the many family-related reasons I turned it down was that I did not want to raise a daughter in a deep red state. This is why.
- No, COVID-19 did not come from gain-of-function research, and the evidence overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.
- You may have seen the piece in the New York Times op-ed section claiming evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis, written by an author who is not a virologist or epidemiologist and who has been flogging a book (co-authored with a climate-change denier) pushing the lab-leak deal for several years. Scientists have been picking it apart all week: Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen posted this thread on BlueSky debunking Alina Chan’s terrible editorial, virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen did the same on Twitter, and biochemistry professor emeritus Larry Moran also debunked her points in a concise blog post. Chan is wrong, and we have copious evidence showing she’s wrong, but she persists – and she got a giant platform to sell her view.
- House Republicans moved on from attacking Anthony Fauci to smearing Dr. Peter Hotez, a prominent voice in the pro-vaccine and pro-science movements who co-developed a low-cost vaccine against COVID-19.
- Dr. Thomas Cech won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with the late Sidney Altman on the catalytic properties of RNA. Dr. Cech wrote a long piece for CNN on RNA, COVID-19 vaccines, and the promise of further health gains from mRNA research.
- Haaretz reported on how the Israeli Diaspora Affairs Ministry waged a disinformation campaign to influence U.S. lawmakers over their war on Gaza, using fake accounts and websites to spread bogus pro-Israel sentiment. Meanwhile, Gaza’s hospitals are on the brink of collapse and Palestinian children are dying, and Palestinians are finding mass graves where Israel withdraws their forces, all while the West fiddles.
- The Columbia Law Review published a massive story from a Palestinian researcher on the Nakba that had been killed by the Harvard Law Review, but the CLR’s board of directors didn’t like it so they took down the journal’s entire website.
- Climate change and ocean acidification are already harming marine biodiversity, threatening our food supply and reducing the amount of oxygen available in our atmosphere.
- Matt Eddy, the father of a HS graduate at Baraboo High School in Wisconsin, rushed the stage at graduation to prevent the school’s Black superintendent from shaking his daughter’s hand. This is the same school where a group of white students gave a Nazi salute and then claimed they didn’t mean it like that or some other bullshit.
- Hamilton Nolan explains that allowing the rich and powerful to opt out of public systems, like mass transit and public education, allows those systems to atrophy and discourages government from repairing them. I think it’s more complicated than that – if you have the money to afford life-saving medical care, should the government prevent you from receiving it? – but his point about mass transit seemed quite relevant given our country’s dismal record on that front.
- Sheri Tenpenny, the Ohio doctor and longtime antivax crank who claimed the COVID-19 vaccines made people magnetic, is now being sued by the IRS over $650,000 in unpaid taxes.
- Judge Clarence Thomas admitted that he took more trips on Harlan Crow’s dime and failed to report them. Is there any good reason why he’s still on the Supreme Court?
- Two Trump-appointed judges ruled that a venture capital fund’s program to provide grants to Black women-owned small businesses violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
- If Trump wins election, Republicans want him to prosecute Democrats as “payback” for his felony conviction in New York. This should be a way bigger story, but the mainstream U.S. media shows time and again it is not up to the task of accurately covering Trump’s campaign and his threats.
- Jared Kushner’s investment fund is in bed with the Serbian government – which is aligned with Russia and denies its role in the Bosnian genocide – in a construction project that will include a memorial to “victims of NATO aggression.”
- Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) is wearing military medals he did not earn, and even his Republican colleagues are calling him out for it.
- Two new Kickstarters of note: Rock Manor Games, owned by my friend Mike Gnade, has a Kickstarter up for a video-game adaptation of their cooperative game Maximum Apocalypse that just funded a day or two ago.
- A new tile-laying game from the master designer Reiner Knizia called Rebirth is also up on Kickstarter and extremely funded.
- JK Simmons is a board gamer! He mentions Wingspan, Clank!, Thunder Road, and more in this interview with Seth Meyers.
- Rascal News, a new subscription site dedicated to tabletop gaming, writes about the consolidation in the space and the threat of AI-generated nonsense. There are still some independent voices in tabletop writing – I would like to think I’m among them – but we’re scattered and we don’t have the same sort of community that exists in, say, the prospect-writing space.